Finland, a gray day (108 piece jigsaw puzzle, click on photo to play)
Finland is a beautiful country rain or shine, there will be more photos, hopefully videos and designs, too, in weeks to come once I have arranged my folders. I have also recorded hours of bird song (assuming the traffic and other noises did not overpower the morning chorus), just in case I need some soundtrack on videos I may compile in future.
Finland, sunset (80 piece jigsaw puzzle, click on photo to play)
Pollening (I suspect the pine) is strong right now – spend a couple of hours outdoors and your devise touch screen will show the dust. I have added here a photo of front porch tiles with accumulated pollen.
Pollen(?) on porch (40 piece jigsaw puzzle, click on photo to play)
I am thinking about joining TikTok and Pinterest, but those can wait until I am back in USA with my contact information back to normal.
This week Iberian Peninsula had a massive power outage that darkened large parts of Spain and Portugal, affected Andorra, France and according to some, Netherlands and Belgium. I have not yet seen the proximal cause for the outage published, though speculations have run from Russian hackers to atmospheric phenomena. What is increasingly clear is that the Western European power grid has become extremely vulnerable to disturbances and even the slightest wobble can collapse the interconnect.
European power grid is at 50 Hz and already 0.5 Hz out of sync causes massive troubles – the power grid can choose to shut down or experience massive damage when the system goes off even that slightly. In Spain, the power grid began to experience fluctuations blamed at some point on ‘induced atmospheric oscillations’ (a mistranslation?) or anomalous heating. However, the power grid had lost large fraction of its buffering capacity as the power production has moved from traditional big power stations with big turbines that maintain inertia against minor fluctuations to renewable energy which uses inverters. In other words, the power grid had become more fragile. Spain had just six days earlier boasted about having produced 100% of its daily energy by renewables. Spain is not alone with its fragile grid, the EU wide race to Net Zero has weakened grids over the Western continent. Individual countries have relied on power production of their neighbors to subsidize their climate programs, and when the neighboring countries transform from help to drain, whole Western Europe is in trouble,
Snake
Unrelated to European problems, Japanese Tokaido Shinkansen line had about an hour and half train stoppage due to a power outage caused by a snake that had slithered into power line. Or maybe the snake was a tool of a global conspiracy against power grids. The article did not know the fate of the snake.
I don’t usually work on Sundays (the day of rest and so on), but the recent news about heightening tensions between two nuclear powers have been alarming. No, not the war in Europe, or the slow boiling in Middle East. I am talking about India and Pakistan. Here is what I get from the non-mainstream news/commentary streams I follow.
Negligible Chance of Mushroom Clouds
Apparently, there was a terrorist attack in Kashmir where 26 Indian tourists were killed. This region has been contested by Pakistan and India for decades and occasionally, a war has flared up. India blames the attack on Pakistan, which claims innocence. Regardless of truth, the relationship between the countries tensed up, as in India giving 48 hours for all Pakistanis to get out of the country, whereas Pakistan closed Indian borders and Pakistani airspace from Indian airlines, while revoking visas from Indians and telling the Indian government to reduce their embassy size to 30 people, no military attaches allowed. India informed that they will no longer recognize the Indus River Treaty, which allocates the rights over this common river between the two countries. This is very important, because Indus river waters about 80% of Pakistani farmland, and if India were to block the water, it would create a famine that would collapse Pakistan. Pakistan has informed that if India messes with Indus river, it will be an act of war. Presumably, India has already been accused of flooding some Pakistani villages along Indus tributary. The same podcast claimed that there has been clashes along the border, not just small arms fire but actual artillery shelling. This is before the formal declaration of war. The Indus river question is an existential threat to Pakistan, which is estimated to have at least 170 nuclear warheads and has a first strike policy. India is estimated to have over 160 nuclear warheads and if things escalate, we could see mushroom clouds, though this is still a very small possibility.
A Podcast that YouTube recommended to me says that the magnetic field of the Sun is weakening. Apparently, this may be somehow connected with the likelihood of big earthquakes. Sun’s magnetic field weakens and strengthens by 11-12 year sunspot cycles but the peak magnetic field has been weakening over the latest solar cycles (data starts in 1970s, so we don’t know how things were earlier). This presentation fits the hypothesis that solar weather including sunspot activity triggers earth quakes that has been making rounds around interwebs for some time, except that in this presentation it is the weakening solar magnetic field that creates sunspots and correlates with the frequency of big earthquakes.
The earthquake – sunspot connection has been explained by the effects of space weather on telluric currents, i.e., the electric currents going through Earth, telluric currents being stronger along fault lines. Living within a walking distance from Hayward fault, I have been interested in earthquakes, waiting for the Big One.
Now it is said that he has resigned as a consequence of a whistle-blower that had implicated Klaus Schwab and his wife in fiscal (and possibly other types) of improprieties, with the WEF board having a sudden emergency meeting. Somehow I doubt this reason – whistle-blowers do not just conveniently appear after 55 years of people not noticing chairman’s practices. I suspect this has more to do with the disastrous effects of the current forced changeson economy and the cultural blowback against the zealous insistence on the Veblen ideologies of the elites enforced with a surveillance state. Since I have not detected WEF to show interest in actual well-being of the masses, rather than the insistence that masses must adapt to their betters’ vision of the Greater Good, I think Klaus Schwab’s ouster has more to do with the smarter members realizing that sawing the branch they are sitting on, i.e., destroying the countries they live in, is not a viable long-term strategy. Even bugout countries, like New Zealand, would sooner or later be destroyed by technocratic practices.
In a WEF’s Davos meeting about a year ago, Blackrock’s Larry Fink who also sits in WEF’s Board of Trustees, surprised by praising xenophobic countries which had instead of immigration invested in AI and robotics. At that point I took it as a bad omen – what are they planning to do with the people replaced by AI and robotics? In retrospect, I think that was an outward sign that there will be changes within WEF.
In summary, I think Klaus Schwab was forced out after his vision of New World Order had proven to be a failure.
Scientists in University of Cambridge have published their analysis of the data collected by James Webb telescope, presenting the results showing likely dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet K2-18b. This is thought to be a hycean world, which is supposed to have large liquid water ocean with hydrogen atmosphere but not all scientists agree even that. There were preliminary results suggesting DMS in the atmosphere published earlier, but this later analysis by the group presented more evidence claiming to have strengthened the earlier findings to 3 sigma levels.
DMS on Earth is produced by microbes like phytoplankton, and the researchers consider it in the atmosphere of K2-18b as a potential sign of large amounts of life in the ocean of K2-18b. However, the possibility of some exotic chemistry occurring in extraterrestrial conditions (different gravity, temperature, availability of component chemicals, space chemistry, etc) has not been excluded and may explain the signal, in which case it would be abiogenic. Besides, collecting spectroscopy signals from faraway planets (in this case about 120 light years away) is difficult, and more data is needed to verify the DMS/DMDS signal instead of some other chemical with similar spectrum at 5 sigma certainty.
In any case, an interesting possibility and worth noting, just in case.
The Poplar Report alerted me to textured vegetable protein in canned tuna, so I decided to look at the current tuna stocks – are we that close to (commercial) extinction? Or is it just the current trend of substituting food ingredients to cheaper or maybe adding weird chemicals for profit?
If I correctly remember, I had considered tuna overexploited since 1980s and had avoided eating it maybe since junior high school. Moreover, this century has had lurid food fakery scandals including the percentages of mislabeled fish sold in USA, often cheaper fish species being passed for more expensive ones.
Tunas, both the canned variety and the sushi can contain mislabeled fish, with especially sushi being notorious for fakery (escolar, also sold as ‘white tuna’, can cause severe gastrointestinal distress), the more expensive varieties were more likely to be faked, risk of fakery presumed to grow with demand exceeding the supply, but sometimes also the cheaper species were mislabeled. (in Spain the likelihood the bluefin tuna you ordered in restaurant is something else is on average 73% with seasonal variation based on bluefin fishing season.)
Now, checking at the state of the tuna stocks, I was surprised to read that conservation methods to protect commercial tuna stock had apparently worked and that depending on report15 out of 23 stocks or 11 out of 23 stocks monitored were estimated to be fished at sustainable levels in 2024 reports (assuming I correctly understood their summary tables) with 88% of tuna coming from sustainably fished stocks (according to one of the reports). The contrast to 2007 doomsday news is promising, but when looking at the FAO report from 2007, I noticed that even then 13 – 14 out of 23 stocks were fully or moderately harvested, the status of the rest being unknown (3 stocks), overexploited (4 – 5 stocks) or depleted (2 stocks). Maybe the difference between today and then is in the levels of overexploitation reducing?
Nevertheless, it is nice to read some good news, assuming the tuna statistics are real. However, considering the unreliable climate reporting, I cannot avoid creeping suspicion that the earlier tuna depletion may have been overrated or the current improvements overstated. And maybe I should go to supermarket myself to check if I can find TVP in tuna can, possibly to buy a can of Albacore labeled as sustainably caught.
A local ABC7 news report from last year informed that the published 2023 Oakland PD clearance rates for violent crime (from assaults to murders) was 3% whereas for property crime the clearance rate (that is, police made an arrest) was 0.1%. For nearby big cities San Francisco and San Jose the respective numbers were 28% and 35% for violent crime and 5% and 7% for property crime. When the ABC7 reporter asked the Oakland PD about the numbers, they were blamed on human error, but they did not have correct numbers available at that time.
While the statistics of San Jose and San Francisco seem pathetic to anyone living in these cities, the Oakland numbers are so close to zero, that if true, instead of a reporting error, the people there would live essentially without law enforcement, if not for the parking enforcement and municipal code inspectors.
According to statistics, Oakland issued close to 269000 parking tickets in 2023. Moreover, a 102 year old man was ordered to clean graffiti from his fence or pay fines. He complained that he could have done it when he was younger but now that he is in wheelchair, the task falls to his 70 year old son. The utility box nearby, also covered with graffiti, I suppose, is apparently OK. However, from the original news: “The city inspector contacted KTVU and said that he would do an immediate inspection and, presumably, cancel the citation.”
How much of this was hype and how much was counterhype, I don’t know (though I suspect my search engines show me very biased results.) On my recent trip to Finland I saw the changes in the countryside, big wind turbines can cause. It takes lots of land and removal of trees or elimination of agricultural fields to build a wind park.
All these projects, while openly posted on-line, are presented so that opposing voices are portrayed as conspiracy theorists and antienvironmentalists. But is it a conspiracy theory if they themselves tell everyone their plans, or worse, their actions?
At least the most fanatical theses from the now destroyed Georgia Guidestones are not openly touted. There are people, other than just me, who would consider the reduction of world human population to 500 million from (official) 8 billion or by over 93% rather genocidal.
But the Green New Leap is not just for UK, Germany, Netherlands or Ireland. Finland, too, is planning ambitious net zero targets, and I mean really ambitious, as in lauded by WEF.
Most of Finland is above 60° latitude, about the same level as Alaska or south end of Greenland, mostly more north than Yakutsk in Siberia. Energy is of utmost importance there. Roughly speaking, a person can survive a few minutes without air, a few hours without heating, a few days without water and a few weeks without food.
Meanwhile in China, 2024 began to build 94.5 GW worth of coal power plants and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects according to two think tanks. Only 2.5 GW of old capacity was closed 2024. (Side note: with China’s economy tanking and exports faltering, what do they need this new energy capacity for?)
But what about the reindeer burps?
Indeed, according to our reliable news media, a study was published that Lapland will not be able to meet its greenhouse targets by 2035 because of the large emissions from its agriculture, namely the reindeer. Which as ruminants are burping too much methane, which is a greenhouse gas. Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the original study to check the claims, and to see if the researchers were in earnest or if this was some sort of reductio ad absurdum-document to demonstrate the futility of the Net Zero targets.
However, assuming the reporting is true, reindeer are part of the Arctic ecosystem, and even if the semidomesticated populations in Lapland were counted as human livestock, those globalist net zero plans that would involve reducing the number of large ruminants, such as grazing cows and sheep, come dangerously close to messing the ecosystems by removing large herbivore guild from the food network. While I can see the point in reducing the use of feedlots and grain / soybean based fodder in ranching, eliminating free-range foraging herbivores is IMHO insane.
Ironically, the climate war against cattle (products) is not fully compatible with the idea of rewilding the land, which presumably involves switching domesticated large herbivores with wild large herbivores to the net zero effect on burps per acre in case of free grazing animals. Large scale rewilding is currently hypothetical rather than practical, as the numbers of large wild herbivores are insufficient for the switch. Humans and their cattle, pets and pests account for about 96% of terrestrial mammal biomass. The remaining about 4% is everything else from Etruscan shrew to elephant. Cows alone are ~40% of Earth’s land mammal biomass, meaning there are no replacement herbivores. And without ungulates, the grassland ecosystems will collapse.
When we consider this and other volcanoes, and the coal plants of China and the rest of the world (not to mention everything else that produces greenhouse gases, such as termites), how much effect would it have on the atmospheric chemistry and global climate change if all the reindeer in Lapland stopped burping?
So it looks like the French won the Game of Empires. For now.
(Countries with overseas military bases, like USA, do not count. The territories have to be internationally recognized colonies or dependencies officially under full or partial rule of the empire.)
PlanktonPunkt 