David Dobrodt

On Jan 20, the U.K.’s CDC Group, the “development finance institution”—actually the government-owned “investment” arm of the Foreign Office, founded in 1948, with a special focus on Africa and South Asia (and nothing to do with public health). On Jan. 19, the Grantham Research Institute of London School of Economics and CDC Group hosted a webinar of the Just Transition Financial Roadmap, launched in 2018 by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Environment and Initiative for Responsible Investment at the Harvard Kennedy School. The webinar led like U.K. and U.S. gangs in establishing a $1 billion fund for “sustainable” investments, in their words, “facilitate a just transition to zero emissions growth in the coal-dependent economies of South Africa and India.” Joining these Malthusians in their launch were the “economic researchers” at the South African Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) and the National Business Initiative (NBI); along with “partners” Observer Research Foundation (of India), the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Initiative for Responsible Investment.

At a webinar announcing the event—which they disgustingly referred to as a “fireside chat”—the speakers, led by the CDC Group CEO Nick O’Donohoe, were united in their goal of not letting go this chance to ensure that what COVID has shut down not be allowed to re-open. While no specific programs were announced, they singled out of South Africa and India as the “two of the largest coal-dependent emerging economies globally. Both economies’ reliance on coal mining and coal-based energy production leaves related industries, workers and communities exposed to the risks posed by efforts to mitigate climate change.” The 90 minute webinar is posted on YouTube.

Of the gaggle of groups that have chosen to associate themselves with this venture, perhaps the most defining is the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute. “Financial advisor” Jeremy Grantham was an “out and proud” follower of Thomas Malthus, and Grantham’s quarterly “forecasts” were closely read by the upper 1% who trusted him with the care of their fortunes. The issue for April, 2011 is titled, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever”—where, among the leading bullet-points we find: “The problems of compounding growth in the face of finite resources are not easily understood by optimistic, short-term-oriented, and relatively innumerate humans (especially the political variety),” and, following that, “The fact is that no compound growth is sustainable. If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.” Below that, in the chart of exponential population growth of the past five centuries, we find just two dates highlighted: The issuance of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798, and in 1938, Grantham’s birthday, labeled, “I was born”! No ordinary Malthusian, this Grantham, but Malthus reborn.

Perhaps the character of the entire “Just Transition” event is best summed up by the (Freudian?) comment of NBI’s South African CEO Joanne Yawitch, who may have revealed a bit too much as she reassuringly said, “The just transition in South Africa is an area of opportunity and not a place of threat.”

The diabolical ironclad beetle (that’s its name, not an indictment) can withstand a load of 150 newtons, or 39,000 times its own body weight. This would be the equivalent of a human weighing 200 pounds withstanding a force of 3,900 tons. For comparison, a fully-fueled Saturn V rocket weighed about 650 tons.

New studies, led by engineers at University of California Irvine and Purdue University found “the diabolical ironclad beetle’s super-toughness lies in its two armorlike ‘elytron’ that meet at a line, called a suture, running the length of the abdomen.”

All insects, arachnids, crustaceans and shelled mollusks have exoskeletons, which support the muscles on the inside and also provide protection. In most flying beetles, there are two flaps of hard material (“elytron”) which protect their wings, and facilitate flight.

The study, as reported by SciTechDaily and Purdue University, and published in the Oct. 21 issue of Nature, found that the diabolical ironclad beetle doesn’t have wings at all, and the elytra have evolved into a unified section and that “the elytra and connective suture help to distribute an applied force more evenly throughout its body.”

They examined a cross-section of this region (across the short axis), and found that the “suture” region was curved back and forth, very much like a jigsaw puzzle piece, which was interlocking, and allowed flexion and delamination to occur. This allows the structure to flex and deform, rather than immediately snap and break.

“‘An active engineering challenge is joining together different materials without limiting their ability to support loads. The diabolical ironclad beetle has strategies to circumvent these limitations,’ said David Restrepo, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio who worked on this project as a postdoctoral researcher in Zavattieri’s group….

“UCI researchers built a carbon fiber composite fastener mimicking a diabolical ironclad beetle’s suture. Purdue researchers found through loading tests that this fastener is just as strong as a standard aerospace fastener, but significantly tougher.

“‘This work shows that we may be able to shift from using strong, brittle materials to ones that can be both strong and tough by dissipating energy as they break. That’s what nature has enabled the diabolical ironclad beetle to do,’” said co-author Pablo Zavattieri, whose lab at Purdue carried out some of the studies covered in Nature. Zavattieri is Purdue’s Jerry M. and Lynda T. Engelhardt Professor of Civil Engineering.

A second article in SciTechDaily on Oct. 25 includes further coverage of the UC Irvine and Purdue studies on the diabolical ironclad beetle.

This discovery has exciting implications for not only improving engineering on Earth, but also for building with strong, resilient materials for colonization on the Moon and Mars.

EIR and the Schiller Institute will soon release a report with a devastating exposure of the genocidal intent of the “Great Reset” and the “Green New Deal”.

How to impose these policies is the subject of an ongoing conference of the Davos billionaires and their globalist corporate allies, which are the same forces which organized Russiagate and the four-year-long regime change coup against President Trump. They can be defeated, if our movement in the west is mobilized based on understanding what they intend to do; and align ourselves with the majority of the human population, in the nations of Eurasia, Asia and Africa, which opposes these insane policies, which can only be implemented if they give up their sovereignty to the globalist predators.

Just as British military intelligence had instructed months ago, the heart of the Biden-Harris “strategy” for the elections – along with the dirty tricks and coup mobilization – is to try to lay the 220,000 U.S. COVID deaths on Trump’s doorstep. That pandemic, and those deaths, are actually the result of British economic policies implemented over a half century by the likes of the Bush and Obama administrations, and those policies are what the Biden campaign would continue in spades. But the problem is that, while critical progress is being made on the vaccine front, the pandemic itself – infections, hospitalizations, deaths – continues to escalate out of control, both in the United States and internationally.

The following formulation from Reuters is typical of the British line: “Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 221,000 Americans so far, has become the top issue for him and Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election.” 

On Friday, the U.S. hit its highest one-day number of infections at more than 83,000 — more than 6,000 higher than the country’s previous record set in July. The seven-day average of new daily cases was over 63,000 Friday – which, according to Johns Hopkins University tracking is an 84% increase over mid-September, which is when things started increasing again. And all of this is before the expected increase coming from colder weather, Thanksgiving and so on. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned yesterday that “We easily will hit six-figure numbers in terms of the number of cases. And the deaths are going to go up precipitously in the next three to four weeks, following usually new cases by about two to three weeks.”

Testing has been increasing over the recent period, but nowhere near as rapidly as the new infections. CNBC reports that the U.S. conducted more than 1.1 million tests on Thursday and a record 1.2 million tests on Friday, and that testing has increased by nearly 11% since Oct. 1. “That compares with a 46% jump in the average daily rate of new infections over that same period, from roughly 42,000 per day to more than 60,000.” Reuters reports that “on Thursday, there were 916 reported fatalities in the United States, a day after the country recorded over 1,200 new deaths for the first time since August. Also on Thursday, the number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals climbed to a two-month high. There are now more than 41,000 hospitalized patients with coronavirus across the country, up 34% from Oct. 1.”

There is of course a differentiated picture, state by state, which is important to keep in mind; but it is also the case that there is a national (and international) dynamic of the disease, since we function as a single country, people cross states lines all the time, and so on.

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar attributed the recent increase in cases nationwide to large numbers of people not following the required personal guidelines, adding that household gatherings have become a “major vector of disease spread.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci also continued to warn about the coming Fall-Winter surge, and pressed for broader use of masks. The needed measures “sound very simple, but we’re not uniformly doing that and that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing these surges,” Fauci said Friday. “We can control them without shutting down the country. We don’t want to shut the country down. Every time I talk about things that we need to do, people get concerned. We’re not talking about shutting down, but we’re talking about doubling down on some of the fundamental public health measures that we need to adhere to,” Fauci said. Asked about a national mask mandate, Fauci said: “I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly. If people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it.”

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation also weighed in on the question of masks, as usual deriving numbers from statistical extrapolations: a new study of theirs reports that if 95% of Americans wore masks in public, more than 100,000 lives could be saved through February.

Despite Pompeo’s bellicose demand that the Vatican cut all relations with China because of their supposedly horrible human rights abuses, the Chinese government and the Vatican have decided to extend their provisional agreement from 2018 on the appointment of bishops by another two years, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Thursday. It is hoped by both sides that further cooperation can lead to eventual official recognition between the two. 

Under the agreement, Chinese religious authorities elect candidates for the Pope to decide, and appoint, new Bishops. 

“The Chinese and Vatican parties have dialogued and certainly the provisional agreement is and remains the strong basis for continuing the dialogue,” Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest and editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Rome-based periodical, told the Global Times.

He noted that “the agreement is of a pastoral nature and intends to ensure that the Gospel is preached easily on Chinese soil and that the right attitude grows, indicating to Chinese Catholics the main path for the correct and fruitful relationship between the Church and the country: to be fully Catholic and to be fully Chinese.”

Although electric vehicles (Evs) are a central element of the Green Deal/Great Reset scheme, it is clear that their means of production are not green at all.

In order to equal the energy stored in a conventional car filled with approximately 40 Liters of gasoline, an EV needs a battery with the weight of at least half a ton. The production of those batteries is extremely energy intensive, and includes the mining and processing of huge amounts of copper, alumina and lithium.

The material consumption for a full electric conversion of the car fleet of a country like England would be twice the annual global production of cobalt, three quarters of the world’s production of lithium carbonate, more than half the world’s production of copper and nearly the entire world annual production of neodymium, according to Michael Kelly (https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/05/KellyDecarb-1.pdf).

If we consider a full electric conversion of the car fleet of all EU member states as planned by the EU Commission until 2050, taking into account the average age of cars being 10.8 years, we would need 26 million Evs produced every year. This would require an increase of world cobalt production by 17 times, of lithium by 6 times, of copper by over 4 times and 8 times the entire world production of neodymium.

To reach the target of 55% replacement by 2030 in the EU, those figures become: 9 times cobalt, 6 times lithium carbonate, more than 4 times copper and 8 times neodymium.

Pollution produced by mining and processing such an amount of materials would be gigantic. Additionally, there would be the need to double the capacity of electric grids and electricity production as well as a new distribution system to be able to charge all cars and trucks at home or at their working place.

Production of electric engines requires rare earth mineral neodymium. Currently, due to environmental concerns (manly raised by the green movement), there is almost no mining of neodymium in the west and China is its main world producer. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/08/04/why-china-is-dominating-lithium-ion-battery-production/)

We have previously calculated the giant increase of electricity production required to fuel Evs. Now consider the power needed to fulfill the above list of material. The green idea in the West to go fully electric and at the same time reject energy-intensive primary power sources like nuclear and fusion guaranties that the energy intensive parts of EV production will never take place in the West (China has a 75% market share in Lithium batteries) and that its economies will die fast, like East Block economies in the post-1988 period.

In her weekly press conference Jan. 19, Dr. Carissa Etienne, Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional adjunct of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that coronavirus situation in the Americas–including the United States–had become extremely alarming. Just in the week previous to her report, she said, there were 2.5 million new COVID cases in the Americas, more than half of all global infections. During the same period 42,000 people died in the region. In her understated fashion, Dr. Etienne indicated that the situation is out of control. Public health policies have failed, infrastructure is inadequate and there’s no predicting what might evolve just in the next two weeks.

Dr. Etienne pointed to the crisis in Manaus, Brazil where the surge in new COVID cases has so overwhelmed the hospitals and caused an acute shortage of oxygen, that patients had to be flown to other cities to seek care. But the situation isn’t limited to Manaus, she said,  Look at Peru, where there are practically no beds available in the metropolitan Lima region–not even ICU beds–and oxygen supplies are very low. As in Manaus, people here are lining up in the street to try to purchase oxygen canisters. ICU occupancy rate in Peru is at 90%, and even in the U.S., there are “some locations” where oxygen is being rationed, Dr. Etienne reported. As also reported by regional media, the situation across the Southern Cone–Argentina, Chile, Uruguay–is also bad. In Chile, ICU occupancy is above 90%, almost as bad as last June. In Ecuador, hospitals nationwide are overwhelmed to the point where at Quito’s largest Carlos Andrade Marin Hospital, patients are sitting in hallways with oxygen cannisters next to them, waiting for a bed to become available.

In the first week of 2021, the Caribbean saw the highest rate of new cases since the beginning of the pandemic; Barbados saw a 61% increase in new cases over the past two weeks.

Dr. Etienne said she is encouraged at the rate by which vaccines are being developed, but emphasized that the problem for much of the Americas will be access. There aren’t yet enough doses available to have a visible impact on transmission; in addition, the new variants from the U.K,, Brazil and South Africa are beginning to show up in the region and likely affecting transmission as well.