They would all be fired if working for a profit seeking company.
‘After a decade of denial and delay, Australia deserves a better future – one with cheaper power, more jobs, and less emissions,’ said Energy Minister Chris Bowen, in his last media release prior to gaining government.
Mr Bowen advocated replacing coal generators with wind and solar, with their shares of electricity supply to increase from 30 per cent to 82 per cent by 2030. To facilitate this, he proposed spending $80 billion on transmission, thereby quadrupling its present costs.
He also ridiculed a Morrison government that ‘does not believe renewables are the cheapest form of energy, or that the world’s climate emergency is Australia’s jobs opportunity’.
Following the May election – the ALP, along with Greens and Teals – received all their Christmas presents at once with an energy supply shortage where a third of the coal generators were out of action, bringing an eight-fold increase in wholesale prices.
After two weeks in office, the new government is now silent on its ludicrous claim that its replacement of coal with high-cost wind/solar generation will save households $275 a year.
The June 8 meeting of energy ministers endorsed the transmission part of the ALP plan only to see this undermined the very next day with the announcement of delays in a crucial element – the conversion of the Snowy Hydro system into a renewables-supportive pumped hydro facility.
Panicked by the tenfold increase in electricity prices, the energy ministers announced measures to patch up the wounds in the market caused by the very political controls they were amplifying. These included giving regulators powers to trade gas, with no consideration of the effects of this on other suppliers’ actions.
Energy ministers also announced replacing the existing ‘energy only’ market with a UK-style ‘capacity market’. Such a system ostensibly offers more funding to controllable supplies like those from coal, gas, and hydro. But it is less effective and more expensive than having decisions on supply reliability made by retailers who need to balance contracts between many different sources. Western Australia operates with a ‘capacity market’ and it has added costs without improving availability.
The recent bankruptcy of half of the UK’s energy retailers demonstrates that a capacity market does not give greater security.
Fundamental harm has been done to the energy system as a result of politicians meddling in commercial matters. The creation of the National Electricity Market and privatisations two decades ago has brought to Australia the world’s most efficient, lowest-cost electricity supply.
There are two reasons why it has since gone pear-shaped.
First, governments have subsidised wind and solar, making coal and gas generators unprofitable and forcing their closure. Governments made it clear that coal generators, which supply 60-70 per cent of our electricity, have a very limited social license to operate. They inhibited access to new coal supplies, accepted activists’ attacks on coal, and closed their eyes to policies of banks that refused loans and of insurance companies that refused cover.
Secondly, governments have foreclosed exploration and development of abundantly available gas in South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales. Astonishingly, in face of consequent shortages, the Victorian energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, advocated diverting Queensland gas to Victoria. In response to criticism of this policy, Premier Daniel Andrews suggested it was only possible for Victoria to supply gas if we ‘frack up the joint’ which he claims (contrary to all the evidence) will harm our prime agricultural land. The state Liberal Party shares the same policy to the great detriment of the people the politicians supposedly represent.
The industry has been treated as the playground of politicians. They have compounded their own errors in subsidising renewables that undermine the whole system by funding the will-o’-the-wisp (which is hydrogen power) and by appointing activists to bloated regulatory agencies and to their own departments.
Creating the damage is easier than repairing it.
The subsidies to wind and solar will continue to poison efficient supply for many years to come. But as a start, governments must abandon all subsidies, free up regulatory restraints, and disengage from controls over retailers and generators. Efficient electricity supply, like that of groceries, telephony, and cars, requires market – not government – control. As has been demonstrated, the latter brings especially perverse outcomes when it seeks to specify particular technologies.
Rectifying the damage also requires restoring the social licence to build new coal power stations and nuclear power. This involves correcting an environment whereby financiers have joined regulators and activists in preventing new investment.
Government leadership is required to undo this damage, including by upholding laws that prevent trespass, abandoning requirements on firms to conform to concocted environmental pressures, and making all businesses aware that discrimination against energy suppliers is alien to government policy.
This will not be easy.
Ministerial statements demonstrate an ignorance in blaming the cause of the current crisis on gas and coal. Both Labor and Coalition politicians have, for the most part, listened to activists and subsidy-seekers and drunk the kool-ade that wind/solar is not only necessary to save humanity but is also cheaper. It seems the situation will need to deteriorate even further before there is a realistic chance of policy reversals.’https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/politicians-have-sabotaged-the-energy-market/
Hunter may be a Woke Dope but he knows how to make money! ‘Moscow’s claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military ‘bioweapons’ research program in Ukraine is at least partially true, according to new emails obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
The commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, claimed there was a ‘scheme of interaction between US government agencies and Ukrainian biological objects’ and pointed to the ‘financing of such activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the investment fund Rosemont Seneca, which is headed by Hunter Biden.’
Intelligence experts say the Russian military leader’s allegations were a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US.
But emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.
He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a ‘science project’ involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine.
‘In June 2020, as the country attempted to recover from deadly and destructive riots after the death of George Floyd, a man from Wisconsin hosted a national conference of self-styled “militia” members in a suburban Columbus, Ohio hotel. Stephen Robeson, founder of the Wisconsin chapter of the Three Percenters, an alleged militia group on the FBI’s naughty list, pestered his contacts across the country to participate in the gathering.
People who attended the conference, including two men later charged with federal crimes related to a plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation cottage in 2020, observed that the hotel was crawling with federal agents.
One of the feds at the conference was none other than Stephen Robeson himself.
Without Robeson’s deep involvement as an FBI informant, the Whitmer kidnapping caper never would have made national headlines a few weeks before Election Day; in fact, the whole pre-election drama wouldn’t have materialized at all. A longtime FBI asset, Robeson was one of at least 12 confidential human sources embedded in the failed plot, which concluded when several men were arrested attempting to buy explosives from an undercover FBI agent in October 2020.
Defense attorneys are building a convincing case that the FBI entrapped their clients, who stand accused of perpetrating an act of domestic terror; a motion to dismiss the federal kidnapping count was filed on Christmas Day. “[The] evidence here demonstrates egregious overreaching by the government’s agents, and by the informants those agents handled,” five defense attorneys wrote to a Michigan judge on December 25. FBI agents and informants, according to the filing, “concocted, hatched, and pushed this ‘kidnapping plan’ from the beginning, doing so against defendants who explicitly repudiated the plan.”
Stephen Robeson played as instrumental a role as any other FBI informant or agent. In addition to organizing the June militia conference, Robeson arranged a military-style training exercise in Wisconsin in July; another gathering in Ohio a week later; a meeting in Delaware in late summer; and a night time surveillance mission outside Whitmer’s vacation home in September. “He also urged people to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials,” anonymous attendees toldBuzzFeed News reporters in July. “Some of those contacts say he called them nearly every day.”
But Robeson had another secret he withheld from the group of would-be kidnappers whom he coaxed into an FBI trap; Robeson is a convicted felon several times over with “a rap sheet stretching back to the early 1980s that includes fraud, assault, and sex with a minor,” BuzzFeed Newsconfirmed.
And Robeson didn’t suspend his criminal ways while working on behalf of the federal government. At the same time Robeson was producing all the optics later used as evidence against the Whitmer “kidnappers,” he committed at least two other crimes.
In September 2020, Robeson purchased a firearm—a no-no as a convicted felon—just a few weeks after he conducted the reconnaissance trip near Whitmer’s cottage. He sold the gun several months later.
In October 2021, Robeson pleaded guilty to one count of illegally possessing a firearm. But rather than recommend the stiffest sentence for the felony charge, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors offered Robeson a sweetheart deal with only two years supervised release and a $100 fine. He will be officially sentenced in February.
And Robeson’s legal woes are mounting. He and his wife were charged this month with fraud for convincing a Wisconsin couple to purchase and donate a vehicle to a non-existent charity Robeson claimed to operate. The couple bought a used Chevy Tahoe for $3,500 and signed over the title to Robeson on September 3, 2020, the same month he illegally purchased the firearm and was working undercover for the FBI.
In the criminal complaint filed on December 20, 2021 against Robeson and his wife, the couple who bought the vehicle said Robeson became “verbally aggressive” when they confronted him about the legitimacy of the nonprofit. “They started to realize the potential that Robeson’s non-profit was not real, as he talked about things such as performing raids with law enforcement and being a part of the ‘three percenters,’” a local prosecutor wrote. Robeson faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
It’s unclear how much Robeson was paid for his stint in the Whitmer kidnapping ruse. According to court testimony, the top informant known as “Dan” received more than $50,000 in compensation—including cash, a new car, and reimbursement for taking a loss after selling his home—for six months’ work on the Whitmer case. It’s also unclear if Robeson drove the unlawfully obtained vehicle while working as an FBI informant, particularly whether he used the truck to transport the suspects to any of his planned events.
Robeson isn’t the only government asset tied to the Whitmer case accused of criminal misconduct. Richard Trask, the FBI special agent who signed the criminal complaint against the six federal defendants, was arrested over the summer and charged with domestic battery for assaulting his wife in a drunken rage following a swingers party at a hotel near their Kalamazoo home. Trask was fired by the FBI and recently pleaded no contest to the charge. (Local reporters also unearthed Trask’s social media account that contained vile remarks about Donald Trump.)
Neither Trask, nor the FBI’s other top agents who handled the numerous informants in the Whitmer case, will testify for the government during the trial scheduled to begin March 8.
So, to summarize: A convicted felon with a lengthy rap sheet marketed himself as a leader of one of the FBI’s most wanted “militia” groups to lure people angry about lockdown policies into an FBI trap that acted as another example of FBI election interference while at the same time committing other crimes. Robeson wasn’t an informant—he was an agitator and an instigator.
And he got paid an unknown amount by U.S. taxpayers.
Unfortunately for the American people, lowlifes like Stephen Robeson and Richard Trask represent the current state of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—a morally bankrupt, politically weaponized agency doing the dirty work of the Democratic Party. It’s only a matter of time before we learn how many Stephen Robesons and Richard Trasks were involved in the events of January 6.’https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/30/the-fbis-criminal-lead-informant-in-whitmer-kidnapping-caper/
In 1998, trillions of dollars started to get sucked out of the U.S. government by the central banks. Our retirement funds have been looted and will within just a few years be nonexistent.
Historically, U.S. intelligence agencies have primarily worked on behalf of the central bankers.
Central bankers are now putting into place a system that will allow them to extract tax without representation.
The central bankers, most of whom are technocrats, have created a breakaway society, a parallel society, in which they are above all law and control everything.
One doesn’t have to have much medical knowledge to see that teetering Fake President Joe has a problem. Yes, there definitely is something ‘…very wrong with Joe Biden—mentally, medically, strategically—or all three.
Of course, he’s long been known as a tone-deaf gaffe-meister. Swearing on live mics. Patronizing politically. As head of administration transparency for Barack Obama, Biden closed the meetings.
Last year, as a candidate for the Democrat nomination, Joe spent much time looking lost in his own Delaware basement. All presidents since 1952 have used teleprompters, few more than Biden’s boss, Obama, who once comically used one standing in the dusty poop of a rodeo arena.
Those machines can be tricky, and the user is expected to appear to speak spontaneously and genuinely from the heart while robotically reading aloud every single word written by someone else scrolling before your eyes. Recall 2016 when Hillary Clinton, likely the worst modern presidential candidate, went on autopilot and even read aloud her parenthetical script directions “(PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE).”
Biden did overcome a childhood stutter. No easy task, but essential for politicians since the invention of radio. Biden’s problems, however, aren’t stuttering. He often appears confused, lost, unsteady, unprepared. Last fall he clearly had no idea what he wanted to say, so at times gave the teleprompter operator on-camera directions—“No, go back.” At one appearance Biden lost track of where he was, standing with his back to the camera.
He shunned spontaneous contact even with cooperative reporters, hardly taking questions. Aides, cupping his elbow for leverage, steered the 77-year-old (now 78) briskly through crowds. Before reducing personal appearances, Biden rambled, often without a point beyond being heard. One time when Jill Biden was speaking and gesturing, Biden put her hand in his mouth. Presumably, he was being silly, but it was a bizarre, worrisome action. Last month she interrupted one joint interview to finish her husband’s wandering answer.
Biden’s campaign days often ended by 9 a.m., while 73-year-old Donald Trump was doing four or five major rally speeches in multiple states daily. You might argue Biden’s absence was strategic to give an imploding Trump the full media spotlight. But it’s not the image of a sharp, fully competent chief executive confident and eager to lead the free world on the world stage.
At one town hall in Iowa, Delaware resident Biden asked audience members how the infrastructure was there in Ohio. Easterners do seem susceptible to confusing Iowa and Ohio. But that’s a dumb mistake casting doubt on mental acuity if you’re campaigning to be president of all Americans. Especially four years after your coastal party lost the election by ignoring most of the Heartland.
In office, Biden has been no model of action beyond photo-op signings. While a masked Kamala Harris stands stoically behind him, the oldest man to become POTUS sits at an empty impromptu desk with an immense presidential seal and his notes. On one Zoom conference with Democrats Biden offered to take questions. Boom! The video feed was instantly terminated. At another event the president couldn’t remember his defense secretary’s name, standing right next to him. While memory losses can occur ordinarily, they are also early signs of dementia, according to medical studies.
When Biden did get out of the White House, he had last week’s disastrous trip up the stairs of Air Force One, where he stumbled not once, not twice, but thrice. As my colleague Nick Arama and others have chronicled here, inept aides, who might have credibly dismissed the awful image as something that happens to everyone sometimes, blamed the wind. The wind? The President of the United States, who must face Xi Jinping, Kim Jung-un, and those murderous mullahs, was felled by the wind? This’s the best line Biden’s band of experienced aides can devise?
You saw much media attention last week on Biden’s exclusive network interview with a handpicked former Bill Clinton aide. It was taped Wednesday but not broadcast until Thursday. What you likely missed in the avalanche of adulation was a tiny italic note on ABC’s transcript—“Edited for Clarity.”
So, in those intervening 24 hours, Joe Biden’s potential confusions, mumblings, mistakes were edited for clarity? Seriously? By whom? Former presidential aides had never heard of such a thing. ABC didn’t answer an email request for clarification. But media does not clean up a president’s words for him. White House officials do not allow anyone else to play with presidential words. And you don’t let the White House change what’s on tape either, certainly not without a full public explanation.
Thursday’s scheduled live news conference should preclude such tinkering.
More importantly, exactly what did Biden confuse? Americans have a right to know without sympathetic media covering for him. And what might that reveal about his mental state? Most Americans know some elderly, even care for them. They understand old folks accidentally fall, forget daily details, confuse names. They’re sympathetic. It’s called aging; it happens to those of us who survive.
But elderly grandparents do not have the nuclear launch codes. They cannot send loyal sons and daughters in harm’s way for decades in distant lands on mission-creep operations. During his almost daily media encounters, Trump underwent nonstop scrutiny. He said and did many controversial things in those 1,461 days. But No. 45 launched no new military conflicts.
Biden has not held a solo news conference in his first two months, a modern record. Another dodgy piece of circumstantial evidence raising concerns about his cognitive condition among ordinary Americans, who may disagree on policies but covet confidence in any leader. Not to mention worried allies and opportunistic adversaries, who may see an opening.
Reminder: In 1962 the world came closest to Armageddon when the Soviet Union moved nuclear missiles into Cuba after Premier Nikita Khrushchev determined that John Kennedy was a weak president.
Biden’s first news conference is Thursday. But by seeking to hide what has become obvious infirmities, aides have not served him well so far. And media seem reluctant to press that issue hard. This has now gone beyond politics. The concerns must be addressed forthrightly.
Free speech gone but supposedly free energy through renewables is here to stay. What a scam!
As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
That adage, however, doesn’t appear to trouble Britain’s current PM, Boris Johnson, whose plan to squander a further £50,000,000,000 on subsidies and over-the-market contracts for intermittent offshore wind power beggars belief.
The Demoncrats want to say ‘There is nothing to see here’ but if Creepy Sleepy Joe gets the WH then expect more of the following from his son, Hunter. There will not be any news coverage of his dealings but they will be taking place none the less. While millions will lose their jobs the Biden’s along with the other ‘We are more important than you’ people will get even more wealthy!
whatyareckon 