Will solid-state batteries bail out electric vehicles? Electric cars currently have rather combustible batteries!

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Recently, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall for electric-vehicle batteries made by LG Energy Solution of South Korea. Fires have been caused by some of these batteries, which are used in Mercedes, Hyundai, and General Motors products, among others.

The problem is that rare manufacturing defects can cause overheating and fires. An Associated Press article describing the recall notes that recalls made voluntarily by individual manufacturers for these batteries date back to February of 2020. In November of that year, GM began recalling over 140,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs to replace possibly defective LG batteries, and LG paid GM $2 billion in compensation.

The insurance industry obviously has a stake in this matter, and a small survey conducted by its Highway Loss Data Institute showed that the rate of fires for electric cars is about the same as it is for gasoline-burners:  0.2 per 1,000 insured vehicle years.

If the best you can say about electric car fires is that they’re no worse than fires in gas-powered ones, that’s faint praise.

Combustible

The underlying problem in electric-car battery fires is the technology. You may not be aware that the liquid or gel electrolyte in the type of lithium battery used in electric vehicles cannot be exposed to air without catching fire. This is one reason that manufacturing such a battery is so tricky.

Back when photographic film was the only way to take pictures, manufacturers figured out how to make hundreds of square yards of sensitive film every day in total darkness. But it wasn’t easy, and the fact that film never got as cheap as, say, toilet paper, had an incalculable effect on the entire industry.

Unless the electric-car business manages to break free of liquid-electrolyte batteries, it may find itself stuck in a similar rut. Except for the battery, an electric car is markedly cheaper to make than a fossil-fuel one. The electronics and the motors are much simpler than the corresponding parts of a gas-powered car.

But right now, the cheapest electrics on the market are many thousands of dollars more costly than an average gas model because of the darned battery, and so the vision of replacing most of our gas-guzzlers with electrics remains just that: a vision.

Potential alternative

On the technological horizon is a development that could change all that:  the solid-state battery. Michael Faraday himself (1791-1867) discovered that solid materials such as silver sulfide could act as electrolytes, which means that ions can move about through them under the influence of electric fields. But up to now, truly solid electrolytes (as opposed to the liquid or gel-like products used in most batteries today) have resisted commercialization for a number of reasons.

A significant milestone in the development of solid-state batteries happened when John Goodenough, who was one of the original developers of current lithium-battery technology, announced in 2017 that he had made a solid-state battery with a glass electrolyte. According to some sources, solid-state batteries could have up to 2.5 times the energy density of current lithium batteries, although it is not clear whether this is a volume or mass energy density.  Either way, it would mean that for the same size or weight battery, a car using a solid-state battery might have a longer driving range than a gasoline car with a typical gas tank.

No one knows yet how to make solid-state batteries cheaply. Thin-film technologies such as vacuum deposition are sometimes used, and while there is concern that such technologies may be difficult to scale, vacuum deposition in other manufacturing areas has been applied to rolls of plastic and other large-scale manufactured goods.  So it’s more a question of investment and effort than fundamental technological obstacles, I suspect.

Tall order

Several automakers, notably Volkswagen and Toyota, are investing heavily in solid-state battery technology. But they have the obstacle shared by all automakers that any product engineered for automotive use has to be a lot more durable and reliable than anything used in the military or even aerospace fields.

Do you think military tank drivers go ten thousand miles without needing any service, or astronauts think they’ll be able to ride their rockets for ten thousand launches without having any problems? Yet we start a car several times a day for years and expect nothing to go wrong.

It’s that kind of standard that every electric-vehicle battery is expected to meet, and the wonder is that they have come this far.  Pardon an old technologist for making a statement that is more intuitive than fact-based, but when I look at a typical EV battery that consists of several thousand individually-manufactured, hermetically sealed, and electrically insulated cells, I see a technology that is fundamentally immature.

Digital computers remained the expensive province of a few wealthy institutions until manufacturers learned to take the many thousands of largely similar components and integrate them onto a chip.

Pricey

I suspect that electric cars will also remain in the realm of the wealthy until solid-state batteries bring the core cost down to the point that people will want to buy them, not because they’re afraid of global warming or want something to match their Patek Phillipe watch, but because they’re cheaper and easier to run than gas-powered ones.

In the meantime, we’re going to have to put up with recalls like the ones for the LG batteries that catch fire on rare occasions, because it seems to be the nature of liquid-electrolyte lithium cells to do that once in a while.

The best manufacturers can do is to watch their processes and inspections rigorously and hope that a better technology will come along that will let them make batteries more like people make computer chips these days, rather than like photographic film was once made, under difficult and unique conditions that are hard to maintain for long.

This article has been republished from Engineering Ethics with permission.

AUTHOR

Karl D. Stephan

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

BLM’s Newsome: NYC Mayor Eric Adams ‘a Coon’ and ‘White Man in Blackface’

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Thursday on FNC’s American Newsroom, Black Lives Matter (BLM) Greater New York co-founder Hawk Newsome denounced New York City’s black mayor Eric Adams as a “coon” and “white man in blackface.”

Newsome said, “This mayor who’s a Democrat, but he spews conservative and Republican talking points.”

By “conservative and Republican talking points,” Newsome means Adams talks tough on crime, whereas Democrats typically excuse criminal behavior and condemn law enforcement instead.

“At the end of the day, we have a name for someone like this,” Newsome continued. “And this is someone we’d call a coon, right?”

“Whoa!” said host Bill Hemmer, taken aback.

Newsome continued: “He is a black man – he’s a white man in blackface, and a very conservative-minded white man, at that. So what we have is a man with hundreds of people on the city’s payroll, billions of dollars in budget, and 40,000 police officers. He has 10 victims in one night. The night before, he had 16 shooting victims on the train, and they say what are you going to do about policing, and he says what about BLM? Is America not smart enough to see him deflecting?”

Speaking of deflecting, the perpetrator of the train shooting was a black racist and BLM supporter, but Newsome skimmed right past that inconvenient detail, and past the larger issues of black crime and black-on-black violence.

The problem that the angry racist Newsome has with Adams is that the NYC leader of the communist revolutionary movement Black Lives Matter believes the police themselves are the problem. Until Adams gets onboard with that, Newsome feels justified in smearing him in the ugliest racial terms.

Walter “Hawk” Newsome

6 Known Connections

In November 2021, Newsome warned that there would be “riots,” “fire,” and “bloodshed” if then-mayor-elect Eric Adams were to follow through on his previously stated plan to reinstate the NYPD’s controversial anti-gun units amid the historic surge in violent crime that New York City was experiencing at that time. “If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing, then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome said outside Brooklyn Borough Hall immediately after having spoken with Adams. That same day, Newsome told followers of his Instagram account: “You and I both know that we are up against an evil and violent system.”

To learn more about Hawk Newsome, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

America must take care of its families, or go the way of the Roman Empire

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Time to turn away from materialism and imperialism.

One thing demographers have known all along is something you cannot deny: “Demography is destiny.” The phrase was coined by 19th century Frenchman Auguste Comte. Agree or not with his positivist philosophy, he nailed it about demography.

While clickbait comes at us with news of wars, markets and celebrity gossip, the bigger story, the backstory behind so much of everything, is demography.

Demography didn’t get much attention in legacy media until 2020 when the British medical journal The Lancet released the most comprehensive world fertility study to date. The study documented a mysterious, unprecedented earth-shattering trend: a 50% decline in world fertility over 50 years, with no end in sight. Even the study’s scholarly authors described their findings as “jaw-dropping.”

We are only beginning to realise the social, economic and political impact. Look no further than the United States. Trends in America are followed worldwide and tell quite a tale.

Rising cost of living

For decades, well into the 1960s, US pensions and retirement benefits proliferated. Why not? Back then, relatively few people lived beyond 80, and it was a given that there would be four or more workers to support every retiree.

But things have changed mightily since Social Security and elderly healthcare schemes came of age. The heady days of easy money are gone.

First, people live much longer and have fewer children. The US fertility rate is 1.7 children per female, 20% below replacement level.

Also, the dominant world reserve currency — the US dollar — has diminished in value. Back in the 1960s you could buy a Coke for a dime. Now it’s at least ten times that. Is the soda worth more, or your money worth less?

Today two incomes are necessary to support the average family. That wasn’t the case back when a Coke cost a dime. Women, mostly out of necessity, entered the workforce.  That meant less family time. In such a system, children become a financial liability.

Then there is the uniquely American higher education industry, a colossal con commanding exorbitant subsidies and insanely inflated fees for a ticket to upward mobility. For the average American family, the costs of college are their largest expenditure apart from the family home.

Covid, the economy and lower fertility are testing the diploma mills as never before.  Also, a growing number of Americans are beginning to push back against a pious professoriate that subordinates authentic education to woke indoctrination.

Today there are over 65 million Social Security beneficiaries and 132 million people who work full-time, just two workers kicking in for each beneficiary. And a lot of those full-time folks don’t make much. On top of that we have Medicare, Medicaid and a vast global imperial footprint, all financed by a fiat currency that is losing value. Without at least replacement fertility, these systems will see a slow-motion collapse.

Thus two troublesome trends confront American families: A diminishing currency (chronic inflation) and declining fertility. Each exacerbates the other.

Also in the mix is an American popular culture promoting consumerism and instant gratification, prioritising creature comforts over children. Hedonism is not family-friendly.

Stop-gap measures

Over time the powers-that-be have tried to fix things with:

  1. Immigration: For years, cheap labour flacks told us that importing vast numbers of unskilled low-wage workers would save Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Not true. Mass immigration does not generate sufficient revenue to offset social welfare costs. (Funny thing about immigration: moneyed interests privatise the profit [cheap labour] and socialise — via taxpayers — the costs). Mass immigration instead suppresses wages, making it harder to rear children. Not only that, recent immigrants and their descendants feel the squeeze like everyone else, and their fertility is now below replacement-level.
  2. Printing money: In order to finance the welfare/warfare state, the government just continues to spend. We’ve become accustomed to debt financing and printing money to prop up a broken system. This works for a time if your money is the dominant world reserve currency. Imagine if you maxxed out your credit and could print your own money to finance it. Works fine until creditors say your money is no good or worth much less than you think. Inflation hurts families.

The above short-term fixes have not worked. And let’s face it: the days of global dollar dominance are numbered. There is a disastrous disconnect between public policy and demographic reality. Try as we might, there is no substitute for children.

America has a large middle class that binds the social fabric and includes most intact families. What is good for the American middle class is good for the family. But the middle class — the establishment’s cash cow — is shrinking.

At the very least, supporting families and children should take priority over subsidies for the elderly. But the elderly vote, and politicians care more about the next election than the next generation. However, supporting parents and children is the solution to preserving retirement programs and the society at large.

Superpower status at the expense of family is a Faustian bargain. We need to hunker down and focus on the family instead of propping up the wastrel welfare/warfare state. Yes, it can be done, though it will require changing our ways, establishing new priorities and investing in the future of families.

If not, look no further than ancient Rome. They also dumped their Republic, became an Empire, spent like crazy and came to neglect the welfare of families.

Is there a lesson here?

AUTHOR

Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Leadership in a time of crisis: Israel and America

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Israel is facing some potentially catastrophic challenges that require supporters of Israel to speak out as never before in support of the Jewish State. Its government is in crisis as well.

NOTE: This is part one of a two-part series, with the second one being entitled On Leaders and War: Ideological Transformation in the West After Ukraine.

Perhaps we have all been so focused on Covid 19 and then on the Russian war against Ukraine, that we have given insufficient attention to other important geopolitical events affecting America and Israel. Surely, the Western world is in a crisis and in times of crisis, good leadership is more important than ever.

One aspect of the crisis is inattention to critical matters. As Covid wanes, hopefully, there is the possibility that on an individual level we shall get preoccupied with all the activities we have missed during the lockdowns – attending movies and concerts, synagogue and public lectures, sporting events, and education. In the case of Israel, we see that Israel is facing some potentially catastrophic challenges that require supporters of Israel to speak out as never before in support of the Jewish State.

The seven most important problems facing Israel:

1. The Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the JCPOA-2, in which the major world powers believe it is appropriate that the world’s worst rogue state – that pledges destruction of Israel (and America) – should be awarded sanctions relief and enough money that it can finance more terrorism, even a war, against Israel. And how sad that the world powers think that it is not an issue of whether Iran gets nuclear weapons but when. It is sad that what appears to be delaying the deal is not the needed moral vision of America, but a Russian demand that its trade with Iran be exempted from sanctions.

2. The United Nations which seems to consider its main duty as criticizing every action by Israel to protect its rights under international law dating back to the San Remo declaration, has now gone even further than usual – its creation of an open-ended and permanent international investigation into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, after Israel’s 11-day self-defense to Hamas firing missiles. The fraudulently named UN Human Rights Council voted to create the “Commission of Inquiry”investigation after the UN rights chief said Israeli forces may have committed war crimes. The resolution called for the creation of a permanent “Commission of Inquiry” to monitor and report on rights violations in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the ‘West Bank’. It would be the first such commission of inquiry with an “ongoing” mandate.

Israel’s representative at the meeting said the commission was “yet another example of a grossly discriminatory and fraudulent body that this distinguished forum should be working to abolish.”

I agree with calling the commission “fraudulent” but not with terming the Human Rights Council a “distinguished forum”. The Israeli representative said experts involved in the commission had made statements revealing a bias against Israel, and that the commission “pre-assumes Israeli violations of international law rather than presuming innocence as is required.” Israel’s UN envoy Gilad Erdan said in a statement: “The UN fell to a new low and approved a budget for a despicable and biased commission that has no right to exist.” He said the commission of inquiry ignores Hamas war crimes, including the 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilians.

Besides the Israel-Hamas conflict, the commission is also to investigate “all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability, and protraction of conflict” including discrimination and repression.

The commission will no doubt ignore that the 11-day war last May, began with Hamas firing rockets at Jerusalem, followed by towns in south of Israel and the Tel Aviv area. Israeli airstrikes in response against targets in the Strip killed some 250 people, including minors, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between terror group members and civilians. Twelve people were killed in Israel, all but one of them civilians, including a 5-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl. Israel has said the majority of those killed were terror operatives and insists it did everything to avoid civilian casualties while fighting armed groups deliberately embedded in populated areas.

3. The increasing anti-Israelism of the Biden administration, and its new ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides. In fact, I believe that Nides’ opinions are so anti-Israel that his appointment should be viewed as a hostile act. Nides, a banker and former deputy Secretary of State under Obama, is Jewish but neither his wife nor children are. His wife will not join him in Israel as she is a Vice-President of CNN, hardly a pro-Israel media.

His anti-Israelism is most apparent when he is in the presence of others who he perceives correctly to be anti-Israel. Daniel Greenfield, writing in INN and also JNS, notes that Nides was featured in a webinar with the anti-Israel group, Americans for Peace Now, whose CEO has described Israel as an “oppressive regime”.

Greenfield asserts that Nides’s main qualification for the job had been yelling “You don’t want to f***ing defund UNESCO” at a former Israeli ambassador. He had also vocally opposed efforts to defund UNRWA and stop subsidizing the terror refugee industry. Early on, Nides announced that he wanted to open an occupation (!) consulate to the terrorists in Jerusalem, over the opposition of the Israeli government, and that he would not visit those parts of Israel wrongly described as “settlements” – because they’re claimed by Islamic terrorists. Many American Jews who made Aliyah live in Judea and Samari and you can imagine how they and their families who may still reside in America feel about the ambassador shunning them.

At the infamous APN webinar, Nides felt he was with the like-minded. APN opposes Jews living in Jerusalem, opposes anti-BDS legislation and opposes Jews defending themselves against Islamic terrorism. And so, Nides’ true feelings were expressed this way: “You have a clear agenda. I think your agenda is where my heart is,” Nides told APN.

Nides also told the webinar that he and Biden wanted to divide Jerusalem and that “my job is to knock down things that make that possibility impossible.” He also admitted that “the idea of settlement growth … infuriates me”. Nides wants to reverse Israel’s success in the 1967 war – he says that his priority is fighting to prevent Jews from living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been captured by invading Muslim armies in 1948 and liberated from their occupiers in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

“We can’t have the Israelis doing settlement growth, both in East Jerusalem or the West Bank.”

Finally, we note that rather than vocally condemning the PLO for subsidizing the murder of Americans and Jews, as they pay pensions to family members of dead terrorists, Nides only appears to be concerned that the terror payments were an “excuse” for Jewish “haters” to cut off funding to the terrorists.

Nides’ positions encourage more Israel hatred among American Jews and non-Jews.

4. The virtue signaling of admitting immigrants to Israel, who are Ukrainian non-Jews who practice Christianity (to a greater extent than most Christian countries) thus jeopardizing the role of Israel as a Jewish state.

5. The continuation in the world’s universities of hate speech and fraudulent antisemitic nonsense such as the so-called Israel Apartheid Week.

6.The practice by Biden of overturning almost everything good, domestically or in foreign policy, done by President Trump. If that practice extends to Trump’s Abraham Accords, this might destroy the best plan for Middle East peace in history. The adoption of the Oslo Accord, after the Six Day War, set Israel on a path that resulted in terrorism and naivete that a terrorist organization seeking ejection of Jews from all of our historic homeland could be a partner in a so-called “two-state” solution.

7. Perhaps most serious of all the problems facing Israel is the fading loyalty of its Arab Muslim citizens to the sovereignty and peacefulness of the nation of Israel. Israel is now facing a growing sector of people who not only do not contribute to the defense of Israel but are involved in terrorism and other violence in the “mixed” cities like Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, and Nazareth.

In recent days, at the end of March and the beginning of April, terrorist murders of Jewish Israelis occured in Hadera, Gush Etzion, and Bnai Brak. But the turning point happened some ten months’ earlier, during Operation Guardian of the Walls.:

On May 10, 2021, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), two Gaza-based Palestinian U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, with the excuse that they were “defending Al-Aqsa,” and citing a dispute over some disputed ownership of homes in East Jerusalem (where the courts ruled in favor of Jewish ownership, began launching rockets and missiles into Israel. For eleven days, over 4,300 rockets and missiles were fired from Gaza towards Israeli civilian centers, throughout the south and central parts of the country, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Millions of Israelis were forced to take cover in bomb shelters. This was especially true in the south, including in cities such as Ashkelon, Ashdod and Beer Sheva, which were severely impacted by the rocket attacks.

In response, the Israeli military launched what it called “Operation Guardian of the Walls” targeting Hamas and PIJ sites and operatives throughout Gaza via airstrikes and artillery fire.

The shocking development was that during this war against Israel by Hamas, there was an alarming outbreak of Arab violence in a number of Israeli cities which have significant populations of both Jewish and Arab citizens. Arabs engaged in arson, looting and rioting. Jewish and Arab-owned businesses and vehicles were targeted and damaged. Synagogues came under attack and were burned and vandalized as well. There were also a number of incidents in which individuals were targeted.

These seven most important problems require great leadership and great policies to meet and overcome them. How are both America and Israel and their leaders poised to meet them?

The one overriding concern that I have in the face of such issues is that Israel and America are currently led by individuals who have so little support, in recent polls, that they may now realize that they have little chance of maintaining their governance in future elections. Thus, they may not govern with the usual moderation that is shown by leaders trying to maintain popular support from a large moderate majority; in fact, if such leaders face almost certain defeat in the next election, they may embrace policies espoused by the most radical of their electoral base.

Some six months since the formation of an eight-party ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and containing everything from Leftists to an Arab party, a poll published by Channel 12 news in December showed that the current government is largely unpopular.

But the survey also showed that new elections would do little except continue the parliamentary deadlock that plagued Israel for some two years and four elections.

The poll showed that nearly twice as many Israelis prefer opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister to Bennett or Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

When asked what government they preferred, 43% said they preferred the previous government led by Netanyahu, while 36% preferred the current government led by Bennett and Lapid. Others had no clear answer.

But Netanyahu still lacked a viable path to forming a government if elections were held today, with only 57 seats to his bloc of right-wing and religious parties. Meanwhile the current coalition would lose four seats, sitting at 57 as well.

The Joint List, a smaller coalition of four predominantly Arab parties, would hold the other six.

A poll in February by Direct Polls showed that if elections were held then, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party would barely be able to cross the electoral threshold.

The 2021 Israeli legislative election saw Bennett’s Yamina party secure six seats. He partnered with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, who won 17 seats, to oust them-PM Benjamin Netanyahu. While Likud had won 30 mandates in the election – and was the winning party in the three election campaigns that preceded it – Netanyahu was unable to form a government.

Bennett then managed to forge a power-sharing deal with Lapid that granted him the premiership. As part of the deal, Lapid is slated to become prime minister in August 2023.

The move sparked outrage among right-wing voters, pundits, and politicians, who continuously accuse Bennett of defrauding the public. It is indeed outrageous that Bennett’s government relies for power on the support of Arab Islamists.

Were elections held at this time, the poll found that the Likud would win 36 seats, followed by Yesh Atid (17), Blue and White (9), Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party Shas (9), the Religious Zionist Party (8), Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism (7), Labor (7), Joint Arab List (7), Yisrael Beytenu (6), Meretz (5), the Islamist Ra’am party (5), and Yamina (4).

But with this week’s resignation by coalition whip and Yamina MK Idit Silman, all may change. Without brilliant leadership by Bennett, the coalition that many feared would not last and would lead to yet further elections, looks indeed to be falling apart.

The coalition, based as it is, and led by a party that actually received so few votes, is now facing a crisis. On Monday, Yamina MK and coalition whip Idit Silman decried Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz from Meretz for sending a letter to the heads of hospitals instructing them to abide by a 2020 High Court of Justice decision and let guests bring bread and other leavened products (chametz) into the hospitals during the upcoming Passover holiday.

Silman stated that this was a cardinal issue for her and threatened that it was something she could not tolerate. Accordingly she has quite the coalition and rejoined Lihud.

But the chametz issue may only be the proximate cause of a split that may always have been inevitable for a politician with a religious base, but trying to govern with radical leftists, secularists and Arabs. Bennett has been turning his attention to the possibility of mediating between Russia and Ukraine; meanwhile, he neglected the concerns of his own party, and these concerns may eventually cause an end to his government, if more members follow Silman’s lead.

Thus, one can say that Bennett’s leadership is perhaps too weak to hold together the disparate forces in his coalition.

Turning to the United States, we see a dangerous failure of leadership by President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris. A sampling of recent polls show Biden with an approval rating between 39% and 45% and a disapproval rate of between 50% and 55%.

Biden has been seen to fumble policies on the economy, inflation, the southern border, crime and drugs, energy independence, China, Ukraine, and corrupt practices with his son Hunter. He often misspeaks and appears to be suffering from age-related mental confusion. His hurried pull out from Afghanistan, abandoning to the Taliban the Bagram Airfields, numerous Afghan interpreters and other American allies and billions of dollars of the most modern military equipment and vehicles, has done incalculable damage to America’s leadership position in the world. What leadership can he offer?

©Howard Rotberg. All rights reserved.

Elon Musk has secured a $46.5 billion financing commitment to acquire Twitter Inc.

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and  from the New York Post reported:

Elon Musk has secured $46.5 billion in financing to fund his Twitter takeover bid, according to a Thursday regulatory filing.

The Tesla tycoon is also considering mounting a tender offer — which would involve trying to buy up stock from existing shareholders at $54.20 per share — in order to grow his stake in Twitter, the filing shows.

Twitter rose 0.6% on the news to $46.98 but remain well below Musk’s proposed takeover price of $54.20, indicating that investors are still skeptical that the deal will go through.

“He’s making the offer and it’s not conditioned on financing or business due diligence,” a hedge fund manager reviewing the situation told The Post, adding that he was surprised at the speed Musk’s dealmaking team is moving.

Read more.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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Woke investors threaten the West’s security

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Since Russia attacked Ukraine two months ago, Western governments have been learning the hard way about the critical importance of energy to their national security. Germany’s 20-year, trillion-dollar “Energiewende” (Energy Transformation) has made its economy totally dependent on supplies of Russian natural gas and paralyzed its response to Russian aggression. French president Emmanuel Macron faces a tougher re-election fight this month thanks to soaring energy prices and failure to replace the nation’s aging fleet of nuclear power stations. The Biden administration is tapping America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to tamp down energy costs as inflation heads toward double digits.

As the West grapples with the energy implications of a hostile Sino-Russian alliance, the steering group of the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, whose members manage over $10.4 trillion of assets, issued a statement urging Western governments not to sacrifice climate goals for energy security. “The world is still heading for an excess of fossil fuel-based energy use that will vastly exceed the carbon budget needed to meet the 1.5° Celsius Paris agreement goal. This trend must be halted,” the United Nations-backed alliance said in its April 8 statement, arguing that “the national security argument for accelerating the net-zero transition has strengthened considerably.”

What, one might ask, is the standing of asset managers to opine on national security matters? They have no expertise in this domain. It turns out that their understanding of the economics of energy policy is defective, too.

The Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance claims that development of new oil and gas reserves will lock in fossil fuel subsidies, exacerbating market distortions. In fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2021 net-zero report states that under its net-zero pathway, tax revenues from oil and gas retail sales fall by about 40% over the next twenty years. “Managing this decline will require long-term fiscal planning and budget reforms,” the IEA warns. Similarly, Britain’s Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that net zero policies will result in the loss of tax receipts representing 1.6% of GDP. So much for the fossil fuel subsidy myth. If fossil fuels were heavily subsidized, eliminating them would mean fossil fuel subsidies disappear. Instead, it’s tax revenues that would melt away to zero.

The net-zero investors cite figures for the decline in solar and wind energy costs. These numbers are based on so-called levelized cost of energy (LCOE), a metric that aims to measure a plant’s lifetime costs. Wind and solar power are intermittent, but LCOE metrics exclude the costs of intermittency, which increase the more wind and solar are put on the grid. Because wind and solar output responds to weather and not to demand, the value of this output declines the more installed wind and solar capacity is available. It was for these reasons that MIT professor of economics Paul Joskow concluded in a foundational 2011 paper that using LCOE metrics to compare intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies, such as coal and natural gas, is a “meaningless exercise.”

Wind and solar investors don’t need to understand the economics of the grid to make money – they are shielded from the intermittency costs their investments inflict on the rest of the grid, which is one reason why their views on energy policy can be taken with a pinch of salt. Their economic illiteracy does, however, make it easy for them to subscribe to the green fairy tale of 100% renewables. They’re not responsible for keeping the lights on – that depends on traditional power plants staying fueled up and ready to spin, which is what Germany can’t do without Russian gas. Adopt the net-zero alliance’s call for no new fossil-fuel investment, and the cost of energy is bound to spiral. And if the lights go out, politicians – not woke investors – get the blame.

Investors’ opinions on energy and national security would matter less if they didn’t have political power. Bloomberg opinion writer Matt Levine argues that asset managers of giant funds form a parallel system of government that exercises overlapping legislative powers with those of governments. These government-by-asset-managers, as Levine calls them, tell companies to do things they think are good for society as a whole, “making big collective decisions about how society should be run, not just business decisions but also decisions about the environment and workers’ rights and racial inequality and other controversial political topics.”

Foremost among these areas is climate policy. Although the Biden administration has set a net-zero goal, Congress has not legislated it, and it lacks the force of law. The absence of legislation passed by democratically accountable legislators, however, presents no barrier to government-by-asset-managers legislating climate policy for the companies in which they invest. “Investors are making net zero commitments for themselves and demanding that companies issue greenhouse gas reduction targets and transition plans for meeting those targets,” says the Reverend Kirsten Snow Spalding of the not-for-profit Ceres Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability.

Neither Spalding nor the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance make a case that forcing net-zero targets on companies will boost investor returns, demonstrating that this is not about investors’ traditional concerns – making money – but about pursuing politics by other means. In this, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is working hand in glove with woke climate investors. Commenting on the SEC’s newly proposed rule on climate-risk disclosure, Spalding says that for investors who have committed zero emissions by 2050, “this draft rule is absolutely critical.”

It’s no coincidence that SEC chair Gary Gensler chose Ceres to make his first appearance to talk about the SEC’s proposed rule. Of course, Gensler didn’t justify it in the same terms as Spalding. To have done so would have heightened the risk of the courts striking down the rule in subsequent litigation. Instead, Gensler attempted to justify the rule as bringing “some standardization to the conversation” and putting material climate information – the SEC issued guidance in 2010 on how companies should disclose such risks – in one place, saving investors the bother of piecing together the information from different sources. Gensler’s explanation, to put it politely, is an implausible one for imposing on corporate America what amounts to a parallel climate-reporting regime to the established framework of financial reporting. Whatever Gensler might say in public, the effect of the SEC rule – if implemented – would be to empower investors to impose net-zero targets on companies, to monitor progress in meeting them, and to hold company boards to account for them.

Unlike elected politicians, woke climate investors are not accountable for the effects of their climate policies: They exercise power without responsibility. This arrangement weakens America’s ability to respond to the geopolitical challenges of a revanchist Russia and an expansionist China. “We are on a war footing – an emergency,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared at the CERA energy conference in Houston last month. “We have to responsibly increase short-term supply where we can right now to stabilize the market and to minimize harm to American families.” Addressing oil executives in the audience, Granholm told them: “I hope your investors are saying these words to you as well: In this moment of crisis, we need more supply . . .  right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”

As Granholm suggested, woke investors have been trying to do the opposite. Despite the war in Ukraine, there has been no let-up in investor pressure on oil and gas companies to scale down their operations. Whatever criticisms might be made of the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Ukraine, it is responsible for taking the awesome decisions that war involves. Investors, by contrast, have no responsibility for the nation’s security and America’s ability to lead the West. By helping investors impose their desired energy policies on American oil and gas companies, the SEC is undermining the national security prerogatives of the Biden administration and eroding America’s ability to meet the challenges of a dangerous world. The SEC is playing in a domain that it has no business being in.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Author

Rupert Darwall

Rupert Darwall is a Senior Fellow at the RealClear Foundation.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Vaxtermination: The Deliberate Culling Of The Human Population?

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In an original production Wide Awake Media published the below documentary titled “Vaxtermination: The Deliberate Culling Of The Human Population?”

Wide Awake Media added this commentary:

Isn’t is odd that so many of the most vocal advocates of mass vaccination are also obsessed with drastically reducing the population of the planet? Hmm, I wonder if there’s a connection between the two?

Watch: Vaxtermination: The Deliberate Culling Of The Human Population?

On May 17th, 2021 in a column titled “On The Brink Of Collapse: America’s Declining Population Growth” Louis T. March reported:

Population decline is coming to America. Radical change is on the way.

Before the 1965 Immigration Act, the US was approaching zero population growth. The “land of the free and home of the brave,” as we call ourselves, has had below-replacement fertility since the early 1970s. We now see that fifty years of importing a new people merely delayed the inevitable. Immigration, which has slackened of late, is no longer a viable solution to either population decline or our mounting economic woes. Those of recent immigrant background have clambered aboard the below-replacement fertility bandwagon. Besides, there are not enough jobs to go around. Bottom line: Americans are having fewer children every year. In the 2020 year of Covid, twenty-five of fifty states had more deaths than births.

This is nothing new to demographers. But the New Normal has rocketed to public attention with a report titled Births: Provisional Data for 2020 from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The report has once and for all discredited a smug commentariat’s early predictions that the Covid-19 lockdown would lead to a baby boom. In fact, it has been just the opposite. Births were down significantly in December 2020, nine months after the lockdowns began. There is no doubt about it – the virus, the lockdown and its resulting economic shock caused millions of couples to delay having children.

From 2019 to 2020, the number of US births decreased 4%, from 3.75 million to 3.6 million. For the past six years (2015-2020) births have declined an average of 2% per year.

No ethnic or racial group was spared. In the same 2019-2020 period, the number of births declined among all: 8% for Asian-Americans, 6% for American Indian/Alaskan Natives, 4% for non-Hispanic Whites, 4% for non-Hispanic Blacks, 3% for Hispanics, and 2% for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders.

The corresponding decline in general fertility rates among these groups was 9% for Asian-Americans; 7% for American Indian/Alaska Natives; 4% for non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, and Hispanics; and 3% for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders.

There was a precipitous decline (8%) in the teenage birthrate (ages 15-19). Births to teenagers have been falling since 1991 and have declined 80% in the last 20 years. The government has long considered teen pregnancy a public health issue, as teenage births are usually out of wedlock, with subpar prenatal care and dim prospects for a stable family to rear children.

Most of these teenagers are scarcely getting by, with low skills and limited incomes, so this particular trend is not due to any improved economic status. Surveys show that today’s teens are less sexually active than their predecessors, have easy access to contraception and abortion, are ceaselessly tethered to their digital devices, vulnerable to a toxic popular culture centered on self-gratification and crushing peer pressure, while bedeviled by drug abuse, pornography, and a host of other distractions. Things have changed a bit since yours truly came of age!

In 2010, the average age of females at the time of the birth of their first child was 23. In 2020 it was 27.

In that 10-year span, there was a 6% birthrate decline for ages 20-24 and a 4% decline for ages 25-29. These are record lows. The 30-34 demographic declined 4%; ages 35-39, 2%; and ages 40-44, 2%. The birthrate for those aged 45-49 remained the same. As couples delay having children, the 45-49 window is where the biological clock runs out.

University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson has stated the obvious, saying: “The [US] birthrate is the lowest it’s ever been.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the overall US birth rate has fallen almost 20%. Yes, the population continues to grow, though in the last half-decade growth is at the slowest rate since the Census began in 1790. As the baby boom generation passes from the scene, there will be successively smaller generations to replace them. Slow growth will yield to no growth, then negative growth.

So America is ageing. Its population will start to decrease. While the elderly do not yet outnumber the young, we are ineluctably headed for that inverted demographic pyramid. Every day there are more elderly to take care of and fewer workers to support them.

Something’s got to give. The ageing of America is upon us just when decades of fiscal profligacy are coming home to roost. The US debt-to-GDP ratio is 127% and rising. In fiscal 2020 the US government collected $3.5 trillion in revenues, or $10,457 per person, while spending $6.6 trillion, or $19,962 per person. The US National Debt is $27.7 trillion and counting.

This fiscal madness is a grave threat to American family life. How? The US dollar is the world’s dominant reserve currency, so all countries hold dollars for trade. Reckless US spending inevitably weakens the dollar. Consequently there is a budding global dedollarisation movement.

Should that prevail and the dollar is replaced as the dominant reserve currency, dollar purchasing power will collapse. It’s called inflation. That, coupled with a shrinking workforce due to below-replacement fertility, will mean crunch time. An economic downturn? We ain’t seen nothing yet. The title of Pat Buchanan’s superb 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower comes to mind.

If you want to start a family, you should do so as soon as possible.

©Wide Awake Media. All rights reserved.

BEWARE: ‘The Communist Chinese Party groomers’

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An online dictionary defines the term “grooming” as “when a sexual or other kind of predator sets the stage for abusing another.”

Such a definition certainly applies to the gangs of Pakistani immigrants in the United Kingdom and Jeffrey Epstein who “groomed” and sexually abused underage girls.

Notwithstanding a ludicrous claim by a Republican political operative named Matthew Dowd that, “If Jesus Christ was alive today, he would be called a groomer,” such a charge is not only deeply offensive to the world’s Christians, it is utterly unwarranted.

Retired Navy Captain James Fanell, however, has coined a new and very apt application of the term when he described as “CCP groomers” prominent Americans who are setting the stage for the Chinese Communist Party to abuse all of us by obscuring –  and enabling – its true, predatory and genocidal designs against our country.

This is Frank Gaffney.

The Secure Freedom Minute – the most interesting, informative and life-saving 60 seconds of your day.

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security podcast is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New Documents: Democrats Sicced the CIA on their Domestic Enemy, President Donald J. Trump

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The Democrats have weaponized and destroyed every U.S. government agency. Irretrievably broken.

New Documents Suggest Democrats Sicced The CIA On Their Domestic Enemy, The President

By: Margot Cleveland, The Federalist, April 20, 2022

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory.

While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements.

When Special Counsel John Durham charged former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann in September 2021, the indictment focused on the Alfa Bank hoax that Sussmann, tech executive Rodney Joffe, and other cybersecurity experts had crafted. The indictment detailed how Joffe and other tech experts had allegedly mined data and developed “white papers” that deceptively created the impression that Trump had maintained a secret communication network with the Russia-based Alfa Bank.

Then, allegedly on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Joffe, Sussmann provided the Alfa Bank material to the media and to the FBI’s general counsel at the time, James Baker, with Sussmann falsely telling Baker he was sharing the “intel” on his own and not on behalf of any client. That alleged lie formed the basis for the one count, Section 1001 false statement charge against Sussmann.

There’s Another Alleged Lie

The 27-page indictment, however, also spoke of Sussmann sharing “updated allegations” on February 9, 2017, to another U.S. government agency, namely the CIA, while allegedly repeating the same false claim that he was not sharing the “intel” on behalf of any client. From the framing of the indictment, it appeared that what Sussmann had shared with the CIA concerned the same Alfa-Bank data provided to the FBI several months earlier, albeit updated.

But then two months ago, as part of the government’s “Motion to Inquire Into Potential Conflicts of Interest,” Durham’s team revealed for the first time that when Sussmann met with the CIA in early 2017, he provided agents with internet data beyond the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory. This data, Sussmann claimed, “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”

The “supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones” were “Yotaphones.” Following Durham’s filing of the conflicts of interest motion, it appeared Sussmann bore responsibility for peddling a second conspiracy theory to the CIA. But the details contained in the government’s motion proved insufficient to understand the Yotaphone angle to Spygate. That all changed on Friday, when the special counsel filed two CIA memoranda memorializing what Sussmann said about the Yotaphones and the data Joffe and his tech experts had compiled.

What Sussmann Told the CIA

The first memorandum, dated January 31, 2017, summarized what Sussmann told a former CIA employee in hopes of scoring a meeting with the CIA. Sussmann said his client “had some interesting information about the presence and activity of a unique Russian made phone around President Trump.” Sussmann claimed the activity started in April 2016 when Trump was working out of the Trump Tower on its Wi-Fi network. That phone was also used on the “Wi-Fi at Trump’s apartment at Grand Central Park West,” according to Sussmann.

The memorandum then noted that “when Trump traveled to Michigan to interview a cabinet secretary, the phone appeared with Trump in Michigan.” The unnamed cabinet secretary apparently refers to Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, whose husband Richard DeVos was chairman of the Michigan-based Spectrum Health in 2016.

According to the notes, Sussmann also told his contact that “the phone was never noticed in two places at once” and was seen “only around the President’s movement.” The memo noted that once, when Trump was not in Trump Tower, the phone was active on the Trump Tower WiFi network. Then, “in December 2016, the phone disappeared from Trump Tower Wi Fi network and surfaced on [the Executive Office Building] network,” the memorandum said, with Sussmann claiming it was the same Yotaphone and that it “surfaced” at the Executive Office Building after Trump moved to the White House.

The Yotaphone is rare, Sussmann told his contact, with only about a dozen or so present in the United States, and Russian government officials often receive a high-end version of the phone as a gift. According to Sussmann, the Yotaphone connected to Trump made a number of WIFI calls to Moscow and St. Petersburg from April 2016 until February 2017.

Keep reading…..

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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VIDEO: Florida’s Senate Passes Bill To End Disney’s Self Governance

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UPDATE: Florida Legislature Votes to Strip Disney of Self-Governing Powers as Democrats Shriek in Protest

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday [April 21, 2022] gave final passage to a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government, handing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a victory in his feud with the entertainment giant over its opposition to the state’s Parental Rights in Education law.

The move could have huge tax implications for the Walt Disney Co., whose series of theme parks have transformed Orlando into one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.

For DeSantis, his refusal to back down to the megacorporation’s demands on sex and gender education, along with his boldness in defiance of COVID-19 lockdowns and other left-wing agenda items, has made him one of the most popular GOP politicians in the country and a strong 2024 presidential candidate.

Read full article.

The bill will now go to Florida’s Republican led House of Representatives where it is expected to pass. The bill will be signed by Governor DeSantis in the weeks ahead. Far-Left Disney messed with the wrong state and the wrong governor. #DeSantis2028!

BREAKING: Florida’s Senate Passes Bill To End Disney’s Self Governance

By Daily Wire, April 20, 2022

Florida’s Republican-led Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that eliminates a special taxing district that allows Walt Disney Co. to govern the land where its theme park is located.

“The measure potentially delivers a blow to the company’s operations in the state,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “The special district, created in 1967 and known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, exempts Disney from a host of regulations and certain taxes and fees related to emergency services and road maintenance.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: We cannot do this without your support. Fact. Our work is made possible by you and only you. We receive no grants, government handouts, or major funding.

Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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U.S. Army Doctor Reveals Medics Were Told Not to Report Adverse COVID Jab Reactions

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Todays blog comes from an article in LifeSiteNews.com. It seemed pretty important that you all realize the total disregard this administration has for our military. It disgusts me and I honor this U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is an Oathkeeper. God bless him.

Here’s the Truth for Health Foundation video, about 1.5 hours long, with U.S. Army LTC/Dr. Peter Chambers’ story.

U.S. Army Doctor Reveals Medics Were Told Not to Report Adverse COVID Jab Reactions

A U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and combat physician has described how fellow medics in the Army were told not to enter records of COVID jab adverse reactions into official databases.

“They either look the other way or they just say, ‘Well, I can’t do that. It doesn’t exist’,” said Dr. Peter Chambers, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, Special Forces Green Beret, and combat physician.

Chambers made the comments as part of the Truth For Health Foundation’s ninth online conference, which saw the announcement of the Foundation’s new global reporting system for COVID jab injuries.

Dr. Chambers’ jab reactions

Discussing the armed forces COVID jab rollout along with Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, the Foundation’s president and CEO, Chambers shed light on his recent experience as a taskforce surgeon for Operation Lone Star, a border security mission of the Texas military at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chambers, a veteran of 39 years and a Purple Heart recipient, received Moderna’s COVID jab in January 2021, unaware of the potential side effects. He now counts himself as an advocate for the “vaccine wounded” due to the adverse reactions he experienced afterwards.

He swiftly developed “brain fog” of a kind which he had not experienced even while suffering aftershock from rockets while on active duty, and experienced loss of eyesight.

Following an eventual MRI scan, after bouts of vertigo, dizziness, and nausea which caused him to crash a truck while returning from night patrol, Chambers was diagnosed with demyelination, a disease which affects the nerve tissue.

Army medics ‘told not to enter’ adverse events into database 

He recounted how he had seen “multiple soldiers” also suffering similar side effects from the injections, along with “six soldiers that have been in the ICU,” and one soldier who was forced to take a second jab despite having suffered micro-clotting after her first.

Dr. Chambers took down the details from these service personnel and entered them into the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). However, he revealed to Dr. Vliet that “surgeons at the military hospitals were not letting them in. They were told not to enter people into VAERS.”

“Doctors told me personally in the active duty system that worked at Fort Sam Houston, that they were not to enter people into the VAERS system,” he added.

Due to the COVID jabs’ collective nature of being experimental vaccines, Chambers noted how “we can’t even enter it [COVID jab injuries] into our own defense, medical, epidemiological database.”

“We can’t even interpret that as a true diagnosis,” he said. “So when you try to speak to other positions, they won’t. They either look the other way or they just say, ‘Well, I can’t do that. It doesn’t exist’.”

Told to ‘pack bags’ over attempt to give informed consent

As taskforce surgeon for Operation Lone Star, Chambers had to fill out informed consent forms, as per Army regulations, for soldiers taking the COVID shots. Chambers noted how he had to “reinforce or confirm” whether soldiers needed the shot, while at the same time, his knowledge of the dangers of the COVID jab was growing.

Of the 3,000 soldiers he briefed, only six took the injection.

Challenged by a senior medical officer over this, Chambers said he was “told that I was to pack my bags and leave the border.”

As LifeSite has reported, Dr. Chambers later testified at a March 10 federal court hearing in Tampa in the Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin case. Chambers said he had been pressured into getting soldiers vaccinated and presented as an exhibit an instruction on religious exemptions that read: “Soldiers will try. Soldiers will fail.”

Praise for new vaccine reporting system

Having faced stern resistance against entering COVID jab reports into VAERS, Dr. Chambers warmly welcomed Truth for Health Foundation’s new vaccine reporting system – the Citizens Vaccine Injury Reporting System (CVIRS)™. “If the system that we have now in the government that they provide for us doesn’t work, then we the people have to provide something, because we still have to treat people,” he said.

Doctors “can’t just quit,” he added. “Not everything is COVID related.”

Chambers was the first person to use and register his vaccine injury on the Foundation’s new system, which is designed to be user-friendly and able to be completed in under 20 minutes. “This system was perfectly created for that, and I am honored to be the first person,” he added.

Help support our brave doctors and medical experts who are putting their livelihoods at risk simply by speaking the truth about COVID-19 here.

©Fred Brownbill. All rights reserved.

The COVID ‘Side Effect’: Almost 1 in 3 Now Suffer Mental Health Crisis Driven by Public Health Policy Trauma

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STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals
  • Nearly 1 in 3 — 27.3% — of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety
  • This is the price society is paying for ill-conceived, irrational pandemic measures and nonstop fearmongering
  • To treat everyone, each of the 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S. would have to see approximately 3,000 patients a year — a patient load that simply isn’t feasible
  • Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or worked our way out of it) can act as a lifeline to others by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we live our lives

The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals. Christin Drake, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, writes:1

“Every day, people call my office looking for help: A loved one has not left their bed in a week. A father is experiencing panic symptoms while preparing his children for school. A young woman is using substances in a way that feels dangerous to her. These are not the worried well. They are people in crisis.

Their conditions are complex and acute, and require the expertise of a psychiatrist who can talk with them, assess possible medical causes for their problems, manage withdrawal, prescribe medications when needed, and connect with other providers … Before the pandemic, I could almost always help. I would be able to find time to meet someone for a consultation, or make a few calls to secure the right referral.

But now, my every available hour — even those that jut into my ability to meet my obligations to my family — is full. My colleagues tell me the same. They are starting work earlier, working later, contending with long waitlists and their own limits. All the while, patients in crisis are going without psychiatric help.”

Depression and Anxiety Are at All-Time Highs

According to the most recent Household Pulse Survey,2 conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 27.3% of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety, and that’s in addition to the 40 million Americans who report substance use disorders3 and the 14 million who have more serious mental illnesses.4

“There are about 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S.5 By my back-of-the-napkin math, if all of us were treating only people with depression or anxiety, each of us would have to see more than 3,000 patients a year,” Drake notes.6

In short, there aren’t enough practicing psychiatrists to handle the burgeoning tsunami of mentally unwell Americans. There also aren’t enough residency positions available to significantly expand the profession any time soon.

The Price of Fearmongering

While Drake doesn’t go into the causes behind the mental health crisis, it’s fairly obvious that this is the price society is paying for our government’s ill-conceived and irrational pandemic measures and the nonstop fearmongering. NPR contributor Kat Lonsdorf describes the constant fear of kidney transplant patient Jullie Hoggan:7

“While the surgery was successful and Hoggan is now vaccinated and boosted, she is still severely immunocompromised and has to take significant safety measures.

‘I’m so nervous. Like, my heart rate is through the roof when I’m out for anything,’ she said. ‘And I wonder if I’m ever able to be out safely again and be normal and go out to a store. Am I going to be feeling that forever?’

Hoggan works from home, rarely leaves the house, and when she does, it’s incredibly stressful. Her husband and college-age daughter both wear masks at home and have to be extremely careful about who they see and what they do.

Hoggan’s pandemic experience carries no violence and there have been no explosions or assault, which is why she has a hard time calling it trauma. But Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA), says viewing the world as unsafe can be a symptom of trauma.”

A Nebulous and Hard-to-Define Trauma

As noted by Lonsdorf, trauma typically involves some kind of life-threatening event or something that leaves you feeling fearful and/or helpless. Many who have religiously followed mainstream news over the past two years have clearly been traumatized, feeling as though death is imminent and there’s no escape. The death-dealing blow — in the form of an invisible virus — could come from anyone, including loved ones. No one was “safe” to be around.

What’s more, the pandemic wasn’t an isolated incident that could be processed and recovered from. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist with expertise in collective trauma, likens the pandemic to a “slow-moving disaster” that “escalated in intensity over time” — and to this day doesn’t have a clear endpoint.8

Not everyone agrees that what we’re seeing is the result of collective trauma, though. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of “The Body Keeps the Score” — one of the most-sold books on Amazon during the pandemic — is hesitant to categorize the pandemic as a collective trauma.

He tells Lonsdorf,9 “We need to be very precise … because if we don’t know what we are treating, we may give the wrong treatment.” He believes we need “a new term, a new language” to accurately define our circumstances. “That’s really what I’m encouraging us to do — to really identify what is making us all feel like we’re barely hanging on,” he says.

Officials Are Unwilling to Let Go of the Fearmongering

Whatever we end up calling it, it’s clear that our government’s and media’s response to the pandemic has been a key causative factor behind this mental health crisis. It’s also notable that even though COVID-19 has become endemic in most parts of the world, causing few deaths, the pandemic has not officially been declared “over.”

In early March 2022, the World Health Organization said discussions about when and how to declare an end to the pandemic were underway, but that “we are not there yet.”10

Denmark, the Netherlands and the U.K. have functionally declared an end to their national emergencies by lifting all or most restrictions, but other countries, such as New Zealand and Hong Kong, are moving in the opposite direction, renewing lockdown orders amid fresh surges in COVID cases (i.e., positive PCR tests, which doesn’t mean people are dying or even getting seriously ill).11

Meanwhile in the U.S., April 13, 2022, the CDC extended for another 90 days the public health emergency that’s been in effect since the pandemic began. In tandem, President Biden extended the mask mandates for airplanes and public transportation until May 3.12

In alternative media circles, fear of the virus has been tempered by more clearheaded analyses of statistics and data, showing that the real-world risk is actually quite limited, and that there are highly effective early treatments available even if you do get infected.

My guess is that those who now, two years in, are still struggling with overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety about the virus are the ones who for whatever reason weren’t exposed to these comforting data, or chose to dismiss them (which is what mainstream media told them to do).

And, if they persist in following the legacy media, there’s really no relief in sight for them. While many now accept COVID-19 as another version of, or addition to, the seasonal flu, and are going about their lives more or less as usual, the mainstream media are trying to pump up the fear level yet again with — you guessed it — another variant.13

This one is called “Xe.” It’s said to be a combination of two previous subvariants of Omicron and the most contagious form yet. “COVID-19 Could be Surging in the U.S. Right Now and We Might Not Even Know It,” a headline for Time magazine announced April 11, 2022, adding:14

“… as the country tries to move on from the pandemic, demand for lab-based testing has declined and federal funding priorities have shifted. The change has forced some testing centers to shutter while others have hiked up prices in response to the end of government-subsidized testing programs.

People are increasingly relying on at-home rapid tests if they decide to test at all. But those results are rarely reported, giving public health officials little insight into how widespread the virus truly is.”

Truth Is a Big Part of the Remedy

This fearmongering is again based on the lie that the PCR test can identify an active infection (it can’t), and the false idea that asymptomatic spread is a driver of infection (it’s not). Time magazine also promotes the false idea that the COVID shot is “extremely effective at preventing severe disease” and that Omicron causes milder symptoms only in “healthy, vaccinated people,” even though real-world data suggest otherwise on both accounts.

There’s no mention of the fact that the COVID shots may be responsible for more than 1.2 million injuries15 and are, by any metric, the most dangerous drugs ever to be released. There’s also no mention of the fact that most people are likely immune to Xe at this point, as it arose right on the heels of a major Omicron surge.

Even questions about remasking have popped up again. “Is It Time to Start Masking Again?” The Atlantic asked April 8, 2022.16 According to The Atlantic, in the face of new variants, we ought to prepare “by having good masks on hand — and being mentally ready to put them on again.”

It’s that kind of mental preparation to face death every day and the useless ritual of donning a mask that is driving people to the brink of their mental endurance. Masking was futile from the start, but that doesn’t stop the mainstream media — which gets its talking points from those trying to figure out how to shove The Great Reset down our collective throats — from pushing this worn-out and wholly unscientific narrative.

Totalitarianism Is Built Through Fear

Let’s face it, they need us to be fearful because, otherwise, they know we won’t comply with what’s coming next — digital identities, biosensors and emotional monitors, vaccine passports, the green new deal (which will virtually eliminate your ability to travel any significant distance), programmable central bank digital currencies (which will give the issuers complete control over your spending) and much more.

For The Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution to come to pass, the great masses must be willing to give up their freedoms and submit to more invasive surveillance and control, and for that, their fear of imminent death must eclipse all other concerns. For a description of how large swathes of society can be made mentally ill, on purpose, see the After Skool production above.

The good news is about half the population (in my estimation) have worked their way through the propaganda and no longer fret unnecessarily. Around the U.S., people are standing up to tyrannical and irrational COVID measures, be it mask and vaccine mandates or inhumane COVID rules in the hospitals.

In Tennessee, for example, a new state law will force hospitals to allow end-of-life visitations for COVID patients, so that they won’t have to face death alone.17 As noted by Dr. Jason Martin, an ICU doctor who’s been on the frontlines since the beginning of the pandemic, “End-of-life care in an ICU with COVID is terrible,” and watching patients die all alone, separated from their families “is a life-changing experience.”

Be a Role Model

There are no simple answers to the mental health crisis facing us, but putting an end to unnecessary fearmongering, I think, is a task that needs to be shouldered by those who still chose to work in mainstream media. On an individual level, it may mean shutting off MSM news altogether.

Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or who have worked our way out of it) can also act as a lifeline to untold numbers of people by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we go about our lives.

Don’t wear a mask to appease people’s fears. Let people see you smile. Be friendly and optimistic when in public. You never know how seeing you enjoy life might benefit someone who feels the world has become an unsafe and scary place.

In the long term, we need additional solutions — we need more qualified psychiatrists and therapists, for example — but in the meantime, we must do what we can, on an individual level, to ease the collective pressure, and we can begin by simply demonstrating that a different reality is possible.

The collective has been squeezed, mangled and brought to the precipice by a few in power. Many have been broken down in this process. It’s now time for the rest of us to take the reins and steward our fellow humans back to reality, back to sanity, by being firm yet kind, principled, ethical, truthful, rational and optimistic.

Sources and References

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Lie of Biden’s ‘Lifesaving’ Treatment

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“I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me…” — Julie, 27

When Julie woke up from her double mastectomy in the children’s hospital in Syracuse, she expected to feel elated. Instead, she only felt numb. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought. Years later, she looks back with anger at the “collaborative idiocy” that crushed her spirit, permanently scarred her body, and left her feeling empty, betrayed, and alone. Like so many victims of the mutilating treatments this White House calls “livesaving,” Julie will never fully get her life back. We’ve gone too far, the survivors of this movement are crying out. And no one, not even the president, is listening.

For Suzy Weiss, who tells their stories, the emotions must be difficult to contain. In a powerful piece called “The Testosterone Hangover,” Weiss is a witness to the pain of these trusting souls — women who were pushed along a path that would ultimately destroy their young adulthood.

Chloe was only 15 when her mother sat nervously in the waiting room, waiting for word on her daughter’s breast removal. Like so many of the teenagers sucked into this world, she was unhappy with how she looked and spent a lot of time on Tumblr, immersed in trans messaging. She remembers sitting on her bed at the tender age of 12, wondering if she was meant to live as a boy. Two years later, Weiss recounts, she was taking puberty blockers and testosterone injections. By June of 2020, she was wheeled into an operating room for a drastic surgery that she would regret for the rest of her life.

Eleven months later, she was still confined to her bed, struggling with the restrictions of “nipple grafts” and other side effects. She started to miss “being pretty” and made the brave announcement that she was going to detransition — a move that made her even more of an outcast at school. Today, she misses the feminine body that she left behind. “I was looking for a niche to fit in and a sense of fulfillment.” Now, she tells Weiss, “I don’t really believe in gender identity at all.”

Meanwhile, people at the highest levels of government seem fixated on casting our sons and daughters in these horror stories — even going so far as to force taxpayers to fund the harm. Congresswoman Mary Miller (R-Ill.), one of the many Republicans appalled by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra’s insistence that children are “entitled” to these treatments, pushed back. She demanded to know if it was “child abuse,” as the American College of Pediatricians has labeled it, to perform sterilizing surgeries on kids as young as 12. He refused to answer. “[The Biden administration is] doing nothing but engaging in extreme woke politics with children being their victims,” she said angrily on “Washington Watch.” “I can’t even think of enough bad adjectives to describe this. It’s evil, it’s insane.”

And the mainstream press is enabling it. Just this past week, the much-maligned PolitiFact, whose obvious political agenda has made its “fact-checking” a punch line, weighed in on the exchange between Miller and Becerra. “Miller said the Biden administration is ‘encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries,’ and ‘are lying to children by telling them puberty blockers are reversible…’ We rate this claim as FALSE.”

That’s news to the medical community, groups of which have openly admitted that puberty blockers are not “fully reversible.” The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) has warned repeatedly that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.” As experts repeatedly point out, several of these hormones are off-label drugs that haven’t been studied for their impact on children. But there are plenty of things experts do know about the side effects, including: “When puberty blockers are administered in early puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones,” SEGM notes, “sterility is expected.”

Even transgender activists — many of whom blazed this trail and underwent radical operations themselves — have been horrified at the rush to transition children. One, a doctor, is speaking out publicly — sounding the alarm that this wave is rooted in social influence, not genuine gender dysphoria. “I have these private thoughts: ‘This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it,'” said Erica Anderson, who, until recently was “on the forefront of transgender care.” He underwent dramatic surgery in his late 50s but believes strongly that the pendulum has swung “to an extreme.”

“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” he told the Washington Post. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element… Teenagers influence each other.” Anderson thinks kids are leaning into gender treatments, hoping it helps with other psychological problems — and then struggle to dig out of the depression when it doesn’t. “I have a dictum: When in doubt, doubt,” she told the LA paper. “Questioning is a good thing. How are you going to find out if you are lockstep with whatever conclusion you come to first?”

Helena Kerschner, an outspoken detransitioner with one of the biggest platforms, is grateful for anyone who raises a red flag. “I had a ton of issues with my academics and my mental health, but I never really got help with that,” Helena said. “As soon as I said I was trans, it was all-hands on deck.” But after a year and a half on drugs, she started to cut herself. “The reality I was living was not lining up with the fantasy I’d had as a teen… It was a crushing and terrifying feeling.”

To her, this White House’s obsession with gender treatments is terrifying. “The fact that there [are] adults as high up as in the Biden administration putting out these claims that young people need to medically transition is really dangerous. There’s no logic to it.”

Fortunately for this generation, there are leaders like Mary Miller who will lay it all on the line to stop more Julies, Chloes, and Helenas from living this nightmare. When PolitiFact and the rest of the Left’s bullies come after her, she says, “I’m going to fight back. If they want to fight, they can bring it on. Because… I’m not backing down.” Thank goodness.

For more on the mountain of facts the Biden administration is covering up to force this issue, check out FRC’s paper by Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, “Transgenderism Has a Science Problem.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Senior Writer.

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

A 40,000-Foot View of Freedom

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Monday afternoon, airline passengers whooped and hollered when flight crews informed them the federal mask mandate was finally over. Crews and passengers responded to the news by ripping off masks mid-flight. Most commercial airlines and Amtrak quickly followed suit to drop their masking policies, as did rideshare services Uber and Lyft. Airlines “were urging that the mandate be lifted sooner,” said Dr. Andrew Bostom, clinical trial epidemiologist at Brown University.

The president who promised to shut down the virus has a strange way of showing it. “Had he been smart, Joe Biden could have owned that glee,” notedNational Review‘s Charles Cooke. “Instead, it came in spite of him, courtesy of a Republican-appointed judge.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the decision “disappointing” but when asked why airplane cabins should be subjected to harsher rules than the White House briefing room, she could only retort lamely, “I’m not a doctor. You’re not a doctor.” Who knew advanced medical degrees were required to form opinions on questions of law, justice, and public policy?

Meanwhile on “Washington Watch,” Bostom, who is a doctor, laid out the science. Since 2008, 14 studies (12 for influenza and two for COVID) have used randomized, controlled trials, which are “the gold standard [for] evidence,” to study whether “mass masking is an intervention which works” for airborne viruses. Bostom said the results of those studies are “uniformly negative.” Nevertheless, “public health authorities have managed to push through mandates,” he continued, essentially turning “the whole evidence-based paradigm on its head.”

Other science opposing the mask mandate concerns the airplanes themselves, which are armed with “highly efficient filtration systems” and “biocidal technology to kill a virus,” explained Bostom. For comparison, “in a restaurant, the air may recirculate through a filter about every 15 minutes. In an airplane, that’s every 30 seconds,” said Ken Klukowski, the attorney representing FRC Action in its own lawsuit against the mask mandate. According to a Defense Department study conducted last year, he said, “it would take 54 hours on an airplane to get infected” with COVID — three times longer than the world’s longest flight.

However, the basic question in the judge’s opinion was legal, not scientific. Klukowski explained, “the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)… sets forth the requirements that agencies need to meet when they’re putting legal obligations or restrictions on you and me.” “A broad body of Supreme Court precedent” holds administrative agencies to a standard of “reasoned decision making,” which the judge found was not met. Thus, “forcing people to wear masks on airplanes meets the definition of what the law calls arbitrary and capricious…. The judge did the right thing,” Klukowski concluded.

The mask mandate was soundly thumped by the gavel, but it’s not quite dead yet. The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced plans to appeal, “subject to CDC’s conclusion that the order remains necessary for public health.” Of course, given the CDC’s preference for political science, they may calculate that opposing the overwhelming weight of medical data is worth it to ingratiate the president with his base. The White House’s continued insistence on encouraging mask-wearing is “consistent with their zealotry, but it’s not consistent with the data,” noted Bostom, nor “with the desires, as you can see by the popular reaction, of the vast swath of the population.”

However, the DOJ has avoided requesting a temporary stay on the ruling, an unusual move which allows the judge’s decision to remain in effect for now. That could indicate the DOJ is tired of getting pummeled in court and wants to rest its sore ribs, that they expect to lose on appeal, and that they’re only appealing on their doubly-boosted boss’s orders. So too, the CDC could, as it has done before, stick its finger into the political winds and then “discover” that “the science has changed.”

In the meantime, honest citizens won’t get kicked off a plane because they can’t keep a two-year-old’s mask on, or struggle to read a book that’s half obscured by a cloth mask serving only to virtue-signal. Americans can board their flights with all the comfort their economy-class ticket allows. You are now free to breathe about the country.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Media coordinator.

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Letter to the Editor of the WSJ RE: Military Preparedness

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Below was reported as being part of a Letter to the Editor in a recent WSJ article in reference to their editorial on the consequences of the The Shrinking U. S. Navy. I think it applies to all our military services these days.

Here’s the attachment to the letter to the editor:

You can relax about our military preparedness. In terms of manpower, we have far more diversity coordinators and gender advisors than the Russians and Chinese. In materiel, our advantage in maternity flight suits is overwhelming. Faced with such potent weapons of war, who would dare engage us in armed conflict?

Harry O. McKinney
Southfield, Mich.

I feel much better about our military now – how ’bout you?

Thank you Fake POTUS Biden, SecDef Austin, Chair JCS Milley and all the other WOKE senior officers who have reduced the morale and fighting spirit of those soldiers in the trenches.

Yes and let’s not forget:

  • the female Navy Officers who graduated from Canoe U (USNA) with poor seamanship training and were in charge on the Bridges of 2 Navy Destroyers which collided with other ships at the cost of sailors lives;
  • the Navy Officer who surrendered two well armed gun boats to Iran without firing a shot;
  • the Army hierarchy which has reduced standards for PT tests;
  • Ranger School Graduations, installed field lactation stations for pregnant female soldiers;
  • the Air Force for installing a Lesbian Commandant of Cadets at the AFA and a black Commandant whose #1 priority was weeding out cadets he felt were racists or sexual harassers;
  • the Marines for reducing standards for their officer training program to commission more women;
  • SecDef Austin for ordering a 50 day stand-down to ferret out soldiers considered extremists (i.e. Trump supporters);
  • Chairman of JCS Milley for touting Critical Race Theory, etc. etc.

Our entire military is now WOKE and more concerned at the top with Climate Change, the environment and Diversity, Equality and Inclusion than combat readiness and warfighting.

©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Wokeism’ destroying U.S. military