Updates On The March To The Great Green Energy Future
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | January 12, 2024
The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.” ) We’re all about to boil! Something must be done!
OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works. We’re far enough into this by now that some of the pieces are starting to blow up in dramatic fashion. Are we allowed to notice?
Here in New York, we got into this game mainly with two pieces of legislation, both enacted in 2018 — at the state level, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act; and in the City, Local Law 97. With both laws the pols set the deadlines for compliance at dates seemingly far in the future, expecting that they would no longer be around to be held accountable. The first of those two laws ordered up state-wide mandates for “decarbonizing” the economy, starting with a requirement for 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030; and the second set limits for carbon emissions for buildings in New York City, some of which have just kicked in effective January 1, 2024. Sure enough, the Mayor at the time of enactment is gone, almost the entire City Council is gone (term limits), and the Governor at the time is also gone.
So where are we?
The Manhattan Contrarian Energy Storage Report of December 1, 2022, led off by sounding a clear alarm: getting electricity from intermittent wind and solar well past 50% of total generation would require enormous quantities of energy to be stored, with technical requirements, including duration of storage, well beyond the capability of any battery currently existing or likely to be invented any time soon. Essentially, if fossil fuels are to be eliminated, there is only one realistic possibility for meeting the storage requirements: hydrogen.
In mid-2023, the New York Independent System Operator, to its credit, recognized the problem — although it buried that recognition deep in a report when it should be shouting about the problem from the rooftops. From NYISO’s Power Trends 2023 Report, revised August 2023, page 7, starting in the middle of a paragraph and without any emphasis:
[T]o achieve the mandates of the CLCPA, new emission-free generating technologies with the necessary reliability service attributes will be needed to replace the flexible, dispatchable capabilities of fossil fuel generation and sustain production for extended periods of time. Such emission-free technologies, either individually or in aggregate, are not yet available on a commercial scale.
With hydrogen as the only possible such “emissions-free generating technology,” how much would hydrogen cost as the solution to this problem, particularly if one follows the hypothesis that it must be created without any use of fossil fuels? My Report, page 14, noted that existing commercial production of this so-called “green” hydrogen was “negligible,” leaving no good benchmark for understanding what the costs might be. As a substitute, I ran some rough numbers based on cost of wind and solar generators to make the electricity and efficiency of the electrolysis process. The result was a very rough estimate that this “green” hydrogen would cost “somewhere in the range of 5 to 10 times more” than natural gas (page 17).
Well, now some new precision has come into view. In July 2022 the UK government launched what it calls its First Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR 1), to obtain bids and award contracts to produce this so-called “green” hydrogen using wind power. The process took a while, but here from December 14, 2023 is the announcement of the first round of contract awards. Excerpt:
Following the launch of the first hydrogen allocation round (HAR1) in July 2022, we have selected the successful projects to be offered contracts. We are pleased to announce 11 successful projects, totalling 125MW capacity. HAR1 puts the UK in a leading position internationally: this represents the largest number of commercial scale green hydrogen production projects announced at once anywhere in Europe. . . . The 11 projects have been agreed at a weighted average strike price of £241/MWh.
£241/MWh? At today’s exchange rate of 1.27 $/£, that would be $306/MWh. Prices of natural gas are generally quoted in $/MMBTU rather than per MWh, but here is EIA’s latest Electricity Monthly Update, dated December 21 and covering the month of October 2023. It gives natural gas prices in the per MWh units. The “price of natural gas at New York City” is given as $11.32/MWh. That would make the price that the UK has just agreed to pay to buy this “green” hydrogen stuff approximately 27 times what we can buy natural gas for here in New York to obtain the same energy content.
And that $306/MWh is just for the hydrogen. It includes nothing for the massive new facilities (underground salt caverns?) to store the stuff, for a new pipeline network to transport it, and for a new collection of power plants to burn it.
To be at least a little fair, natural gas prices do vary considerably by location. Even within the U.S., some prices per the EIA Report are about double the New York City price, and in Europe maybe four times the New York City price. But those prices are affected by European demand for LNG from the U.S., due to their own stupid decision to ban fracking for natural gas combined with the unpleasantness in Russia.
And even if you figure that green hydrogen can be produced for “only” 7 – 10 times what it costs to buy natural gas, rather than 25 – 30 times, is anybody really going to go forward with such a project to replace all natural gas in an entire modern economy? It would be completely nuts.
Finally, let’s take a look at how New York is progressing toward that 2030 mandated goal of 70% of electricity from renewables. Data on electricity production for New York State for 2023 are just out from the NYISO. The good people from Nuclear New York (advocates for more nuclear power plants) have compiled the ISO data into a helpful aggregate chart covering the years 2019 (immediately after enactment of the Climate Change Act) to 2023. Here is the chart:
Out of 152.3 TWh of electricity produced or imported in 2023, fossil fuels continued to provide 63.3 TWh (41.5%). Most of the imports (14.5%) are undoubtedly from fossil fuels as well. Wind/solar/other provided just 12.1 TWh, or 7.9% of the total, barely up from about 6% in 2019. And that’s now suddenly going to go to 70% by 2030? Ridiculous. Meanwhile, the big story leaps off the page, as the Nuclear New York guys emphasize in the headline. The State forced the premature closure of two nuclear plants in 2020 and 2021, which caused the (carbon free) nuclear share of the total to drop from about 29% to only 18%; and almost all of that was taken up by two new natural gas plants, causing the fossil fuel share of the total to soar from only 34% to 41.5%. No person looking at this chart would ever conclude that New York has spent the past five years embarked on a crash program to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar. That process is going absolutely nowhere.
The truth is that the march to the Great Green Energy Future is over, but no one is yet willing to admit that.
Some More Energy Reality In New York City
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | November 28, 2023
New York thinks it is going to be the “leader” in showing the world how to transition away from fossil fuels to “green” energy. Our politicians and bureaucrats have not bothered with things like feasibility studies or demonstration projects showing that this can be done, because after all they are geniuses and it is up to the little people to figure out the details. So the energy transition has been ordered up via statutes filled with mandates and deadlines and penalties, with no attention paid to feasibility or cost. We now all get to sit back and watch as this crashes and burns.
In New York City, the main statute on this subject, enacted in 2019, has the title of Climate Mobilization Act, also known as Local Law (LL) 97. The most significant impending mandates are for reductions in “emissions” from buildings, with the first deadline for residential buildings coming right up in January 2024. Few buildings will fail the 2024 cap, but the mandated emissions limits keep ratcheting down over time. The mandate for 2030 for residential buildings over 25,000 square feet is set such that it cannot be met if the building continues to use gas or oil for heat; so effectively this is a mandate to convert to electric heat by that time.
Daughter Jane — a board member of a co-op in Queens which is over the 25,000 square feet and thus subject to the 2030 mandate — has previously covered this subject at Manhattan Contrarian. Here is her piece from October 2022. The gist was that boards in Queens that had looked into how to convert had been advised of very large costs that were not remotely affordable for their middle-class owners. Jane is currently on maternity leave from Manhattan Contrarian, having just delivered her third baby, so I am taking up this subject while we await her return.
So how big a problem will it be for these buildings to convert to electric heat? Nobody really knows. Remarkably — given that the first deadline, applicable to at least some buildings, is barely over a month away — as far as we can find there doesn’t exist a single example of a large building that has successfully completed a conversion that others can look to to benchmark feasibility and cost. New buildings can be built with all-electric infrastructure without great difficulty. But nobody has any solid idea how much will it cost, and how much disruption will be involved, to retrofit heat pumps into large apartment buildings built in the 1970s, or 60s, or 50s, or even the 1920s.
However, that may be about to change. There is at least one conversion project for a large building that is under way, and near completion, and scheduled to begin operation imminently, in December 2023. You won’t find any reporting about that project in the New York Times or other such media operations that constantly hype the dire need to reduce emissions. However, here is a piece, dated October 28, in a local newspaper called the West Side Rag that covers the Upper West Side neighborhood of Manhattan. The headline is “Heat Pump Project in Frederick Douglass Houses Nears Completion; ‘Powered by Electricity’.”
So, how is it going? The answer is that this effort is an unmitigated disaster. Let’s look into the details.
The conversion in question is taking place at one building in an eighteen-building New York City Housing Authority complex called Frederick Douglass Houses, located in Manhattan along Amsterdam Avenue between West 100th and 104th Streets. NYCHA is effectively exempt from LL97, since it is not subject to the penalties for non-compliance that apply to privately-owned buildings. However, the mandated emissions limits do nominally apply to NYCHA, and for this conversion NYCHA partnered with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to finance the work.
From the West Side Rag:
A two-year project to convert a public housing building to an electrically powered heat pump system is nearing completion on the Upper West Side. The 58-year-old 20-story tower at 830 Amsterdam Avenue (100th Street), part of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Frederick Douglass Houses development, is being retrofitted to provide heating, cooling, and hot water for residents – and to serve as a possible template for converting more of the 2,410 buildings NYCHA maintains citywide. . . . The project is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and give tenants more control over the temperature in their individual units. . . .
The agencies [NYCHA and NYPA] said the new heat pump system would be the first of its kind at a public housing facility in New York state, and the Amsterdam building would be the first to move away from burning fossil fuels. That makes it “a model for the portfolio,” said Vlada Kenniff, the housing authority’s vice president for energy and sustainability. . . .
So with the first deadline for LL97 compliance barely over a month away, they are just approaching the completion of a heat pump conversion on exactly one of their 2,410 buildings.
Here, from the West Side Rag, are pictures first of the building, and then of the array of large heat pumps that have been installed out in what apparently previously was part of the parking lot:
Then the West Side Rag gives figures for the number of units in the building and the cost of the project. The number of units is 159. And the cost? $28 million.
Holy shit! That’s over $176,000 per unit, just for the heat pump conversion. At a current financing rate of about 7%, that would mean an addition to rent of well over $1000 per month per unit just to finance the purchase and installation of the heat pump system. For comparison, NYCHA here gives the average monthly rent of its apartments as $557 in 2023. So if the tenants were expected to pay the cost of buying and installing this heat pump system, that would mean more than tripling each tenant’s monthly rent. Maybe we shouldn’t worry, because undoubtedly NYCHA’s plan would not be to burden the residents, but rather to get the money from the infinite pile of federal loot available from Washington.
At that same NYCHA link, they give their total number of apartments as 177,569. To provide each of them with heat from one of these heat pumps at $176,000 each would cost a total of over $31 billion.
In other words, converting this building has shown that retrofitting a central heat pump system like this for such buildings is infeasible to the point of being ludicrous. But of course, this is New York, and nobody is allowed to say that. The West Side Rag seeks out a comment from one Paul DiMichele, identified as a spokesman for NYPA:
NYPA spokesman Paul DeMichele explained via email that “the complexities of the project motivated NYPA and NYCHA to think about other scalable solutions to bring heat pump technology to NYCHA residents.”
Ah, the “complexities.” Well, how about another possible approach, such as a heat pump on the roof?:
An earlier effort to install a different kind of heat pump mechanism on the roof of the Fort Independence Houses in the Bronx experienced similar challenges, with program manager Jordan Bonomo quoted in a story about that project on the Grist media platform explaining, “Each apartment had a story. We quickly realized that while we like the technology, we couldn’t possibly scale that across our portfolio.”
And thus, with a month to go to the first (theoretical) deadline under this LL97, we are exactly nowhere in coming up with a way to convert older buildings built with gas or oil heat to electric heat pumps at any remotely affordable cost. Energy reality is rising up once again.
Fired Unvaccinated New York City Teachers Still Fighting for Reinstatement and Back Pay After Supreme Court Win
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 31, 2023
In a precedent-setting victory last month, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled that 10 New York City school teachers fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds must be reinstated with back pay, benefits, seniority and attorney fees.
But the city immediately appealed the decision, so none of those teachers have returned to their jobs or received any payments.
“These workers absolutely did win reinstatement and back-pay,” Sujata Gibson, the teachers’ attorney told The Defender. “Unfortunately, in New York State courts, the government is entitled to an ‘automatic stay’ of any such relief pending resolution of the appeal.”
Gibson also said:
“CHD [Children’s Health Defense] is supporting us in our fight to defend these wins on appeal, and we are pursuing additional options to try to speed this process up and secure relief for additional plaintiffs. But the fight is not over yet.”
Nearly 7,000 New York City Department of Education (DOE) workers who sought religious accommodation from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in 2021 were denied based on standards that a federal court later ruled unconstitutional.
Some of the workers, along with Teachers For Choice, sued the city in February, in a lawsuit sponsored in part by CHD and CHD New York.
The suit also sought class-action certification for all DOE workers who were denied religious exemptions. Judge Ralph Porzio denied the motion to grant class status, a ruling the plaintiffs are appealing.
Regardless, Gibson said the decision was “a precedent-setting victory, and a watershed moment in the teachers’ fight.”
Thousands of workers were subjected to the very same processes the judge ruled were “arbitrary and capricious,” and they could sue individually based on that precedent, if it is upheld by the appeals court, Gibson said.
Michael Kane, one of the plaintiffs and a member of Teachers For Choice, told The Defender that after filing the appeal, the city has six months to take the next step in the case — so even though they won with the last ruling, the fired teachers will have to continue to fight for their rights and the relief they are entitled to.
The struggle continues, despite confusion on social media
Last week, a Fox News story from Oct. 25, 2022, “New York Supreme Court reinstates all employees fired for being unvaccinated, orders backpay” was picked up and celebrated on social media by influential figures and their followers. It circulated on X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram, where hundreds of thousands of social media users “liked” the posts, Kane said.
The story itself was vague — it did not cite the actual case that had been ruled on and it gave the impression that all New York City workers fired for refusing vaccination would be returning to work with back pay.
In fact, the story was posted after the state’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of plaintiffs George Garvey and 15 other New York City Department of Sanitation employees who were fired by the city for non-compliance with the mandate.
That historic ruling was applicable not only to the 16 workers who sued but also to all public employees in New York City, including the police and fire department.
But in that case, the city also appealed the ruling and the appeals process is ongoing.
New York City workers, with substantial public support, continue to fight, Kane said.
He added:
“This isn’t just for us, it’s for our kids and our grandkids. This is laying the groundwork. It took over 50 years for Plessy v. Ferguson to be overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. Civil rights battles are long, protracted struggles, and that’s what we’re in. It’s not fun, but that’s what we’re in.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Where Is the Proof that Over 37,000 People Died in New York City in 11 Weeks?
By Jessica Hockett | Wood House 76 | September 8, 2023
It’s unacceptable that officials haven’t had to substantiate the biggest mass casualty event in New York’s history. Until they do, I’m not buying this all-cause death curve.
See this? It’s INSANE.
It’s 37,469 New Yorkers dying in two and a half months — a mortality increase equivalent to almost more than eight 9/11 events. A ridiculous 20,000 deaths list COVID-19 as underlying cause, including a suspiciously high number of younger adults who died in hospitals.
Unlike 9/11, we don’t know who all died.1 Investigative journalism and public burial records for Hart Island (where unclaimed decedents and city burials go) have aggregated less than 10% of names of New Yorkers who are purported to have passed away in spring 2020.
Unlike with the city’s historical archives for 1855-1949, we cannot review digitized proof of death for each decedent.
Unlike Chicago & Milwaukee, New York has no public database that shows individual deaths processed by the medical examiner’s office.
Unlike in Massachusetts & Minnesota, death certificates are not subject to FOI request and have not been obtained under public records disclosure laws.
Unlike in Ohio, the release of death certificate data is not being litigated.
So we’re left with numbers in reports and Excel spreadsheets, records sent to the feds and protected in CDC WONDER, and no real proof that this number of people died on the days they are alleged to have died.
Sorry, but I’m not buying what this ⬆️ is trying to sell. 2
The steepness of the daily death curve simply doesn’t work.
Viruses aren’t bombs – including pathogens with the infection fatality ratio of influenza at most. A “spreading” risk-additive pathogen doesn’t show up in mortality data overnight. 3
There would be signs and signals. Yet, we see none and are asked to believe that government officials were prescient enough to catch the virus “just in time”.
Elsewhere, I’ve spelled out many of the deadly iatrogenic policies implemented all at once. But the scale of deaths in hospitals plagues me. Whether we’re talking ED visits or inpatient admissions at “epicenter” and high-death hospitals, the city simply did not have the patient intake to make the numbers make sense. Consider: peak census for COVID-positive inpatients is reportedly ~15,000. The number of inpatient deaths that cite COVID as underlying cause in that time is… ~15,000. 🤔 [CORRECTION, 9/11/23: I misread the state’s presentation of the census. Peak COVID inpatient census was 12,184, which makes the 14,704 inpatient deaths in the spring that attribute underlying cause to COVID even MORE ridiculous.]
How do you lose [more than] the peak COVID census equivalent in 11 weeks with record-low intake???
The only way that starts to work is if a whole lotta people who were already in the hospital as of March 1 were tested for COVID and died, with their deaths attributed to the “novel virus,” and the public made to believe it was spread that killed those people.
Since third-party witnesses were banned from healthcare settings, and the public hasn’t compelled proof of what went on inside those settings, officials can apparently claim whatever they want and get away with it.
I, for one, want certainty that the deaths actually happened on the days they are claimed to have happened. It seems silly to dissect what caused the deaths if the deaths haven’t truly been substantiated.
Could there be fraud?
People ask me about the “F” word – fraud – and I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that YES, we could be looking at a fraudulent all-cause death curve.
Based on everything I’ve obtained & reviewed in the past 15 months – including some things I haven’t yet written or spoken about publicly (but will) – I’m concerned that one or more of the following could have occurred in/with New York City:
- Deaths that actually occurred before mid-March were pushed forward into the excess death period – anywhere from several weeks before several months or more.
- Deaths that occurred in later April 2020 and/or thereafter in 2020 were “pulled back” into the excess death period.
- Some deaths that occurred in one place of death (at home, in nursing home facilities) were double-counted as hospital deaths.
- A portion of deaths that occurred in hospice facilities at some point are in the hospital inpatient death numbers, thanks to the March 23, 2020 executive order that afforded dual-certification to hospice beds as hospital inpatient beds.
- Fabricated death certificates are in the data. This is less likely, but a potential scenario would involve sudden “dumps” of certificates and/or records that list only U07.1 as underlying cause with nothing else listed (i.e., incomplete death certificates).
Any of these could have involved holding death certificates for later processing and part of what was behind thousands of “probable” COVID deaths the city added between April 14 and June 1, 2020.
If fraud isn’t in the mix – and the deaths legitimate in every way – then officials should have no problem releasing the records to back up their assertions.
We’ve been lied to about everything in this mess.
I want proof.
1 Memorialized in March 2021, but without disclosure of names.
2 This data was obtained from NYC DOHMH and differs somewhat from federal data. I wrote about the differences here.
3 Spread of mass-testing does.
Republican Lawmakers Question NYC Reporting of Unvaccinated Teachers to FBI
Sputnik – 23.06.2023
WASHINGTON – A group of Republican US House lawmakers are requesting info from New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks on the city’s practice of assigning “Problem Codes” to teachers who refused a COVID-19 vaccination and sending their data to the FBI, according to a letter sent by the lawmakers on Friday.
“I am writing to request greater information about the New York City Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) practice of assigning ‘Problem Codes’ to the records of New York City educators who lawfully chose not to receive COVID-19 vaccinations,” the letter said. “Moreover, the Department sent educators’ fingerprints to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the New York Criminal Justice Services.”
The letter was signed by House members including Representatives Nicholas Langworthy, Andrew Garbarino and Elise Stefanik.
Earlier this year, New York City officials incorrectly claimed that the Problem Codes are not part of a permanent personnel record and are not shared with any external organizations, the letter said.
Problem Codes were added to all employees who were placed on vaccine mandate leave, the letter said. The city used the same Problem Code for unvaccinated teachers as it uses for individuals accused of molesting, raping or harming a child, the letter said.
The Problem Codes can have a “profoundly negative impact” on flagged educators and can hinder their future employment prospects, the letter said. Educators are often unaware they have been flagged until they face employment rejections elsewhere, the letter said.
“City Hall’s false and misleading statements regarding the existence, nature, utilization, and impact of Problem Codes on teachers’ livelihoods cannot be accepted at face value. The City has been less than forthcoming about the Problem Codes issued to educators,” the letter said.
The lawmakers are requesting that Banks provide them with information on the purpose and utilization of Problem Codes by the city, explain discrepancies in their claims and clarify the transfer of fingerprint information to law enforcement, according to the letter.
The letter also requests information on what measures may be taken to rectify any “unjust consequences” faced by educators as a result of the Problem Codes, as well as whether the city has any plans to revise their practices.
New York City to Track Personal Food Choices Using Credit Card Data
BY IGOR CHUDOV | APRIL 18, 2023
Remember the crazy right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that our food purchases will be tracked to reduce our CO2 consumption?
That one is turning out to be true!
Yesterday, New York City announced its plan to track the “food choices” of New Yorkers using credit card data from individual store purchases. According to the mayor, tracking individual food choices is a step towards “reducing the CO2 output” of New Yorkers.
The Adams administration has announced a plan to begin tracking the carbon footprint created by household food consumption as well as a new target for New York City agencies to reduce their food-based emissions by 33% by the year 2023. [Did they mean 2032 – I.C.? ]
New York City, in partnership with American Express, a credit card company, will track purchases to calculate New Yorkers’ carbon footprints:
The new plan puts the city on par with London and 13 other cities to incorporate food consumption into its greenhouse gas emission metrics. The effort to examine the environmental effects of eating foods like meat and dairy was first announced about a year ago as part of a collaboration among major cities across the globe.
You would think such a plan would only be made after a conversation with New Yorkers, right? After all, the mayor of New York is supposed to serve New Yorkers, not the other way around.
However, the reality is that there was no consultation and no “conversation” because New York’s mayor Eric Adams is sure that people do not even want to have a “conversation” about interrogating their food choices.
On Monday, Adams acknowledged that interrogating people’s food choices would be difficult. “I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation,” he said.
The WEF’s “My Carbon” Plan
Eric Adams, of course, is not serving New Yorkers, whom he did not even consult. He is serving his sponsors, demanding that food and other personal expenditures be tracked to advance climate goals. The World Economic Forum proposed tracking personal CO2 consumption in its infamous “My Carbon” agenda article.
The WEF explains that tracking individual choices was always met with resistance. Fortunately for the WEF, the Covid pandemic, caused by a mysterious lab-made pathogen, changed this calculation and, according to the WEF, allowed us to extend “pandemic measures” into consumption tracking due to greater social acceptance of the governmental intrusion into our personal lives:
Few cities exhibited more sheep-like adherence to pandemic measures than New York City, so it should not be surprising that “food purchase tracking” is being tried in that particular locale in accordance with the WEF’s instructions.
Tracking of purchases will not be limited to food, of course.
On Meat, Health, and Freedom
This article is intentionally neutral on meat and health. Some of my subscribers are vegans, and some are avid meat eaters. I respect everyone. I was a vegetarian for a whole year, a long time ago. I try to eat less meat nowadays, which still amounts to eating too much, but I am trying.
Rather than framing this issue as a health matter, I urge you to consider it a question of basic fairness: the unelected, supranational, self-appointed masters of the world are trying to track and influence our behavior without even asking for permission or our opinion.
We are being assured that this is done for our good. However, these same people benefit financially from well-placed investments in companies growing fake meat comprised of cancer tumor cells:
Lab-Grown Meat Is Made of Cancer Cells. Would You Like It Rare or Medium?
We are generally taught that conflicts of interest should make us question the intentions of people promoting ideas related to such conflicts.
In the case of Covid-19 or climate change, we are asked to throw such precautions away and put blind faith into mega billionaires benefiting mightily from the pandemic or their climate change investments.
As skeptics and critical thinkers, we should refuse to believe promoters standing to benefit financially from their crazy ideas. Instead, we should demand a close and skeptical look into what is behind the curtain.
I am sure, however, that instead of skepticism, we will get more fake fact checks, denials, and gaslighting.
Trump’s arrest exposes America’s Soros-style (in)justice system
By Tony Cox | RT | April 12, 2023
Alvin Bragg, the New York City district attorney who made a name for himself by arresting Donald Trump, waxed triumphantly about his effort to take down the former president. You see, the Manhattan prosecutor said, no one is above the law in the “business capital of the world.”
“We today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg told reporters last week, following Trump’s arraignment on 34 criminal charges. “No amount of money and no amount of power changes that enduring American principle.”
So as Bragg tells it, the patriotic decision to prosecute Trump was all about equal justice under the law. Never mind that Bragg campaigned for office by pledging to prosecute the locally hated ex-president in a county where Joe Biden won 86.8% of votes in the 2020 presidential election. And never mind that Bragg’s 2021 campaign for the Manhattan DA job was bankrolled largely by billionaire activist George Soros, the biggest donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes.
That’s right, Bragg says his case is legally and ethically righteous. However, a closer look at the indictment reveals that the charges he filed are so legally dubious that only a Manhattan jury of Trump haters might buy his story. He’s prosecuting Trump for allegedly falsifying business records six years ago, and he’s bypassing the two-year statute of limitations on such misdemeanors by elevating the charges to felonies. To make that possible under New York’s criminal code, he’s claiming the offenses were committed to cover up violations of election laws when Trump was running for president in 2016.
Those alleged violations stemmed from a supposed hush-money payment to a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with Trump. The payment wasn’t illegal on its face, but if it was proven to have been made solely for the purpose of helping Trump win the election, it would exceed the legal limit for a political contribution. Both the Federal Election Commission and the US Department of Justice looked into the matter at the time and found no cause to pursue a case against Trump.
Even if you give Bragg the benefit of the considerable doubt regarding his motives for going after Trump – just as the 2024 election is approaching, with the former president polling as the top Republican candidate – it would be tough to argue that he’s driven by the interests of justice. For one thing, Bragg shows no interest in investigating the leaks of information about Trump’s prosecution to the media, which is itself a felony under New York law.
For another, his approach to justice is making the city increasingly more lawless. Bragg used his first memo after taking office as DA in January 2022 to direct prosecutors to quit sending so many criminals to prison and downgrade charges for such crimes as armed robbery and drug dealing. He also ordered his underlings to make sentencing recommendations that address racial disparities in incarceration – meaning the criminal’s punishment should depend at least partly on his or her skin color.
During Bragg’s first year as DA, 52% of the felony cases referred to his office were downgraded to misdemeanors (the opposite of the Trump charges being upgraded to felonies). Nearly half of the felony cases Bragg’s office did take on ended in defeat for the prosecution.
With many laws being enforced lightly, if at all, crime has surged in America’s largest city and the business capital of the world. Car thefts are at a 16-year high. There were more than 2,000 felony assaults committed in January alone, up 15% from a year earlier, according to police figures.
If there’s one thing on which Bragg appears to be really cracking down – other than Republican presidential candidates – it’s self-defense. Consider the case of Manhattan parking-garage attendant Moussa Diarra, who woke up in a hospital earlier this month to find himself handcuffed to his bed. The 57-year-old had been shot twice by a suspected car burglar. The suspect also was shot, during a tussle for his gun as the garage attendant fought for his life.
Weeping at his predicament, Diarra reportedly told his boss, “I got bullets in me, and I’m chained to a hospital bed, but I didn’t do anything wrong.” He was charged with attempted murder and illegal possession of a gun – the same gun that the suspected burglar, a career criminal with over 20 arrests on his rap sheet, used to shoot him.
The charges against Diarra were later dropped, “pending further investigation,” amid public outrage over the case. Diarra had to hire a lawyer, who suggested that his client was initially charged because the authorities hadn’t had time to sort out how the two men wound up shot. But police claimed the DA’s office directed the arrest and charging of the garage worker.
This might be viewed as an aberration, or merely an unfortunate circumstance for Diarra. Perhaps he was handcuffed to his hospital bed because police couldn’t immediately discern that he was a hero, rather than a perpetrator, so it was just a placeholder to charge him. That might be believable if not for Bragg’s pattern of trying to punish people who defend themselves.
Before Diarra, there was Jose Alba, a 61-year-old Dominican bodega owner who was attacked behind the counter of his Harlem store by a 35-year-old black ex-con last July. After sitting passively and pleading with the assailant, reportedly saying “Papa, I don’t want a problem,” Alba fought for his life as the attack escalated, stabbing the younger man to death. Surveillance video of the incident shows Alba being stabbed by the attacker’s girlfriend as he fights the man off.
Alba was arrested for murder and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island jail, where he reportedly didn’t even receive proper treatment for his stab wounds. His bail was initially set at $250,000. Bragg finally dropped the charge weeks later, but only after public outcry, including statements by Mayor Eric Adams and New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton that Alba clearly acted in self-defense. The DA didn’t charge the girlfriend who stabbed Alba.
In another case, Bragg broke a campaign promise to drop the charges against Tracy McCarter, a nurse who fatally stabbed her abusive husband, allegedly in self-defense. In other cases, he has downgraded charges against serial criminals, such as a man who had nearly 90 arrests on his record and had his bail set at just $1 after being busted last month for two alleged robberies on the same day.
In rationalizing his policies against enforcing some laws, Bragg has claimed that limited resources must be freed up to focus on violent crime. Yet, on his watch, violent criminals – at least those who weren’t acting in self-defense – have been set free without bail while awaiting trial. The DA cut a sweet plea-bargain deal for a man arrested for raping a teenager, requiring him to serve only 30 days in jail, but while out on bail and awaiting sentencing, he sexually assaulted five more people.
Nevertheless, with resources stretched thin and a poll showing that 40% of New York City office workers are considering leaving the city because of crime concerns, Bragg has found time to prosecute a political enemy. He’s doing so in a case stemming from seven-year-old allegations that the more relevant authorities – those who police federal elections – found unworthy of pursuing.
Whatever is going on with law enforcement in Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan, it’s not about equal justice under the law – or any kind of true justice at all. This sort of unjust legal activism isn’t limited to New York, either. Soros has reportedly helped stake about 70 lawyers to victory in district attorney elections around the US. These social justice warriors have made their cities less safe and more racist, calibrating their prosecutorial policies to essentially legalize certain types of crime and favor certain categories of criminals.
MSNBC political analyst Peter Beinart recently offered a leftist’s perspective on what’s driving the prosecution of Trump, arguing that a coalition of groups that are historically victims of discrimination – black people, Jews and “LGBT folks” – have “come together to push back against the white Christian nationalist assault on American democracy.”
Yes, the aggrieved victim classes are so concerned about protecting democracy that they’re banding together to take down the leading Republican presidential candidate, potentially taking him off the 2024 election menu if they’re successful. They would love to dictate the candidates from which voters can choose because, you know, democracy.
The first arrest of a former US head of state is a clown show, which some foreign leaders have been honest enough to point out. For instance, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said, “Think what you want about former President Trump and the reasons he’s being indicted, but just imagine if this happened in any other country, where a government arrested the main opposition candidate. The United States’ ability to use ‘democracy’ as foreign policy is gone.”
Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
The New York City Department of Health created “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor social media
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene set up a “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor what it would determine to be “dangerous misinformation” posted on social media, non-US sites, and non-English media in the US.
This “misinformation” mostly had to do with Covid vaccination – the Department was determined to drive vaccination rates up by spreading its word, and in this gathered over 100 partners whose job was to craft positive messaging around the controversial subject.
Among those the dedicated new unit is working with is Public Good Projects, otherwise known for receiving funding from a lobbying group representing two major Covid vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna.
Their “good” work here also included sending Twitter, on a weekly basis, lists of posts slated for censorship.
In an article published by the NEJM Catalyst journal, those behind the effort are now assessing the Unit’s work as successful, what with it being able to “rapidly identify messages” deemed as containing inaccurate information about the virus, vaccines, treatment, etc.
And although admitting that “vaccine hesitancy” remains high around the world even two years after the vaccines were first introduced – and this is something attributed to “disinformation and misinformation” and continues to worry the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Surgeon General, as well as “medical experts” – the New York City Health Department thinks that it did well in getting its own narrative out, particularly in traditional media.
However, it needed help on the internet and so, in 2021, the NYC Health Commissioner penned a letter to the largest social networks asking them to engage in “broader efforts to curtail deliberate disinformation, particularly from the most notorious spreaders of disinformation and from non-English language sources.”
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
This is also where the Public Good Projects came in, to enlist social media “microinfluencers” to spread pro-vaccine messages, and train others to come up with campaigns.
The email Dave A. Chokshi, New York City health commissioner, addressed to then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with the subject line reading, “Vaccine Misinformation,” urges the pair to “take immediate action to stop the spread of fraudulent and inaccurate information about COVID-19 vaccines” on their platforms.
Chokshi wanted this action to be “effective and vigorous” and asserted that misinformation on these sites, as understood by the city’s Health Department, was “costing New Yorkers their lives.”
Twitter and Facebook were then urged to do the following: “Consistently and promptly remove all misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines from your platforms and ban any user that repeatedly posts misinformation, including the Dirty Dozen; redesign the algorithms used by your platforms to avoid amplifying misinformation, particularly among non-English languages; provide greater transparency to your data to allow health departments to better identify, track and understand the spread of misinformation, and amplify messaging from trusted public health experts and local partners.”
New York City’s New ‘Public Health’ Plan: Let Garbage Pile Up on the Sidewalks
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | October 29, 2021
In the name of “public health,” the New York City government this week has been telling city employees to take the experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots by Friday at 5 p.m. or be fired, or as the city government terms it, “placed on leave without pay.” Plenty of city workers of all types upset by this attack on their freedom have been taking to the streets in large numbers to protest, often admirably joined by leaders of their unions.
Apparently, New York City garbagemen upset with their mistreatment have chosen to skip days of work as well. The result, detailed in a Thursday article by Jean Lee at NBC News is trash piling up in parts of the city as regularly scheduled trash collection fails to occur.
What to expect after the Friday deadline? Continued piling up of trash on New York City sidewalks, right next to where millions of people in the densely populated city live, work, shop, and play each day is a good bet. Lee quotes the president of the Sanitation Officers Association:
Joseph Mannion, president of the Sanitation Officers Association, fears the trash pileups might foreshadow a possible worker shortage on Monday if vaccination rates among sanitation workers don’t increase by Friday. He said that the sanitation department has been moving to snow season shifts — 12 hours instead of eight — in anticipation of a possible worker shortage.
‘Prepare for the worst and hope for the best,’ Mannion said.
But Mannion is skeptical and said that he knows many sanitation workers are “hardened in their beliefs” and will refuse vaccination, even if it means being put on unpaid leave.
‘I know more people are getting vaccinated, but is it going to change around 60 percent to 80 percent?’ asked Mannion. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
More and more people in New York City must be asking themselves which is a healthier, and more pleasant, option: (A) letting trash continue to pile up on sidewalks while 100 percent of garbagemen are confirmed to have taken the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots, or (B) having trash regularly cleared from sidewalks while letting garbagemen choose whether they take the shots? My guess is that most people will choose option B, especially if the trash keeps piling up for weeks or even months on end.
How to kill a thriving metropolis in 7 months: NYC’s Covid-19 failure is a vicious spiral directed by sadists
By Helen Buyniski | RT | October 12, 2020
Seven months into the pandemic, as many US states inch back toward ‘normal’, New York is in the grips of a crime wave, reinvigorated lockdowns, and widespread fear of pretty much everything. Thank local government.
New York City has lost billions of dollars in tax revenues on tourism, music, art, theatre, restaurant dining, and everything else that once fueled its mammoth economy over the seven-month Covid-19 pandemic shutdown. It’s in worse shape than most US states, and unlike many others, its continued misfortunes are largely of its own making.
The shuttering of the city’s iconic Broadway theaters alone has sent hundreds of thousands out of work and signaled to both wealthy city inhabitants and out-of-town visitors that their cash is better spent elsewhere. Theaters announced just weeks ago that performances would be cancelled through March 2021, and the Metropolitan Opera House canceled its entire season through 2021.
New York’s famed restaurant scene isn’t faring any better. The ‘lucky’ establishments are finally – as of two weeks ago – allowed to operate at 1/4 capacity indoors, which given the amount of money they’ve lost over the last 6 months is a band-aid on a cannonball wound. The unlucky ones in New York Governor Cuomo’s newly-invoked ‘red zones’ must continue to seat patrons outdoors in the freezing cold as summer gives way to a damp, chilly autumn. To make matters worse, there’s no Thanksgiving parade, no Black Friday shopping, no fun allowed.
Perhaps pandemic-fearing wealthy New Yorkers would have left anyway, taking their tax dollars with them. But tourism might have filled some of the gap. What city in its right mind would turn up its nose at $11.5 billion, the estimated total spent by out-of-town visitors to the city’s famed theatrical productions alone? Why leave that money on the table, especially when the virus that had held the industry hostage for months has been steadily on the wane? With Governor Cuomo demanding billions in relief from the federal government to make up an economic shortfall that stems from his own policies, surely he can’t afford to keep the state (and its largest city)’s biggest draws closed down indefinitely?
Pleas to cancel rent have fallen on deaf ears, and starving artists’ efforts at workarounds have been squashed. Cuomo even passed an executive order in August – with the coronavirus “peak” safely receding in the rearview mirror – to ban ticketed live performances, and has revoked liquor licenses from bars that failed to serve food with their takeaway drinks. Is it any wonder the city is hemorrhaging cash, as well as the creative and interesting people who put it on the map?
MURDER, SHE COUGHED
To understand the motivation someone like Cuomo could have for destroying the city whose economy once kept his state alive, it helps to grasp the concept of the “self-licking ice-cream cone,” a phrase that has been attributed to NASA scientists but can in general describe any system that exists for little reason other than to continually justify its own existence.
Every politician who’s ever harbored dreams of becoming a totalitarian dictator has embraced the directive “never let a crisis go to waste,” and both Cuomo and NYC mayor Bill de Blasio are true believers. After attaining unprecedented powers through the emergency measures passed under cover of Covid-19, they aren’t about to let them go quietly, and have seemingly set up a perpetual motion machine of crisis that – accidentally or otherwise – ensures NYC will remain forever financially in the hole. The type of cash lifelines that might get the city back on its feet – as a post-9/11 tourism blitz did – are blocked (no one’s going to visit a New York where dancing, drinking, and taking in a show are off-limits). Average New Yorkers, too, are paralyzed by the thought of the scary virus lurking just outside their door, ultimately learning to love their captors, Stockholm-Syndrome-style – if this month’s fawning New Yorker profile of Cuomo is any indication.
With the virus no longer nearly as much of a danger as it was back in April, the would-be dictators have put together what looks for all the world like a diabolical plan to empty out the city and take advantage of artificially-lowered property values.
First, the criminals are unleashed. Bogged down with a directive to enforce the ever-growing range of social-distancing and mask-related offenses, New York’s police are no match for the flood of actual criminals released into the streets under statewide “bail reform” that all but guarantees the “catch and release” of muggers, rioters, and other criminals whose offenses stop short of rape and murder. Even more miscreants have been paroled early due to Covid-19-related overcrowding excuses.
Next, the threats are broadcast 24/7 over every media outlet. CCTV videos of horrific, unprovoked attacks on old women, small children, everyday middle-aged types, a jazz pianist, a would-be rape victim on a subway platform – the point is made that everyone is a potential victim. The solution is presented as a paradox: do New Yorkers who’ve just spent months demanding the city rein in its police want more cops patrolling the streets? Surely that’s not very “woke” of them. While they hem and haw, the rampage continues, and the debate ends with helpless, fear-crazed city dwellers throwing up their hands and begging Cuomo and de Blasio to Do Something, Anything, to Make the Bad Men Stop. Both men play dumb – there’s nothing they can do! Better get used to crime, or flee!
TERROR IN THE TUNNELS
The plight of the subway is instructive. The city’s legendary 24-hour train system was ordered to close down service from 1am to 5am back in May, ostensibly for “cleaning” because of the virus. The homeless people who’d taken to sleeping on the cars in the wee hours were a health risk, New Yorkers were told, and the city promised free transit alternatives for those whose jobs required them to be able to move around during those times (promises which in many cases did not materialize). Ridership, already severely curtailed due to pandemic fears, was down 90 percent at one point, sending the already cash-strapped system deep into the red.
Now, we’re told, the lack of people (and cops) on the subway has made it a predator’s playground. The lack of witnesses makes it easy for unscrupulous crooks to nab a wallet, attack an innocent commuter, and otherwise strike fear into the hearts of those New Yorkers who still think there’s a future for their city. “We need more cops!” the law and order types cry, only to find the MTA is deeper in the financial hole than ever and de Blasio is leery of upping the police budget. Presumably, the next move will be to decrease operating hours still further, guaranteeing the downward spiral continues indefinitely.
A tourism and entertainment-based city without so much as a public transit system is, quite simply, doomed. The only question, then, is why are de Blasio and Cuomo so determined to run New York into the ground?
Cuomo’s “economic reopening council” is guided by private equity partners who actually make their profits off the carcasses of dead and dying businesses, so it’s no mystery why he’s eager to see restaurants and theaters crash and burn. Private equity stands to make billions on all the vacant office space and abandoned properties from city institutions forced to pull up stakes. If Cuomo does what his deep-pocketed donors tell him – he’s not called “Governor 1 Percent” by progressives for nothing – he might even get that rumored Attorney General spot he’s being reportedly considered for in a Democratic Joe Biden administration. And perhaps de Blasio – despite never polling above 0.1 percent during the 2020 primaries – actually thinks he has a shot at the governor role.
Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, as the saying goes.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
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Book Review
How the CIA hid their MKULTRA mind-control program
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | September 17, 2021
Back in the early 1990s, I spoke with John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book (1979) that helped expose the existence and range of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.
Marks related the following facts to me. He had originally filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests for documents connected to the CIA’s mind-control program. He got nothing back.
Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”
I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.
But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.
Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
He told me that three important books had been written about MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton. … continue
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