The anti-EV backlash

An article sent by a friend represents a distillation of the mainstream anti-EV backlash I've been expecting to see.

I'm sure there will be more and more of this, including some reality (automakers cutting back EV development and production).

The reality is that EV's contain more expensive raw materials, therefore they will be less profitable to make, therefore automakers will resist making and selling them, just as in the past.

I see no evidence of a (derided) New World Order sufficient to override this longstanding tendency.

Then automakers will claim, on the basis or horribly marketed and overpriced (compared to what most can afford) EV's, that there just isn't a market for EV's.

Once again, it happened before.

IMO the EV market will remain stunted until we give up a few things.

The first is insisting on all-electric purity.  Hybrids...especially those oriented towards efficiency...have made sense for most people for the last 20 years.  The raw material cost is far lower because they require far smaller batteries.  If many people get can get most of their miles on electric power, but always have gasoline available as backup, that's a far easier sell.  But nowadays all the subsidy and verbal support goes to EV's.  Hybrids could continue to be made (even low mileage EV's) with much safer and less-reliant-on-poorly-sourced-materials NiMH batteries.

The second is the need for high miles per charge.  The cost of a battery sufficient for the now fairly common 300 mile range results in cars too expensive for most.  There could be supply issues too, if everything else were to be phased out by 2030 or even 2035.  Most people could easily get by with 150 mile range.

However recent moves such as eliminating the subsidies on EV's with foreign batteries has removed the low cost options from the market, many of which had not been well represented here anyway.

It's as if they want to kill the EV again, and this time Congress.

US automakers have not recently been doing "small" very well.  They've virtually given up that market (even "cars" in general, to some degree) to foreign manufacturers, while they focus on selling trucks bigger than the buyers need.

Chevy, even Toyota, have killed off one tiny car line after another.  Chevy had the Cruz and the Volt, then they had the Spark.  The Volt was one of the most impressive automobile designs ever and if Chevy hand't quit making them I might be driving one now for that reason.  A true series plug in hybrid EV.

China is producing more and more small EV's, not available or subsidized here.

It appears that Communism is necessary for the EV transition, and probably most other aspects of the conversion to renewable everything that humanity and the world need now.

On the other hand, I hope this is real.  Solid State batteries could be made without lithium, and even if they do use lithium they are much safer and more reliable.  But then it's sad that Toyota makes this all about 900 mile range (who needs that???), and not safer/cheaper.

Wind and Solar are Complementary

Solar power, obviously, is greatest during midday and you get nothing at night.

Wind power, in most of North America does the opposite.  In midday, wind is down to very little.  But wind starts picking up around 7pm, reaches peak levels just before sunrise, then goes back down to very little by midday.*

This means that the power provided by a good mixture of solar and wind power in combination is fairly constant on a 24 hour basis.  You can check this out on the various real time graphs published by ERCOT in Texas.  Conveniently, they have a graph showing Combined Wind and Solar for both the current day and the previous 24 hours and projected 24 hours.  These data are available to power plant operators for them to make daily plans.  The combination of the two sources averages above 15Gw, reaching above 20Gw at midday (because solar power is peaking, and so are air conditioning needs).  

As I'm writing this, it peaked today at noon at 23,850 Mw.  Last night at 1am, it was up to 22,034Mw at 1am.  The low point was in between at 8am at 14,012 Mw because the wind had ramped down but the solar hadn't kicked in.  Tomorrow they are projecting a similar combined low of 12,225 Mw at 8am.  The evening low point at 9 pm is similar, they are projecting 13,465 Mw tonight.  In between the low points it appears as a fairly smooth graph, no doubt the result of averaging enormous numbers of inputs, and biased toward the high side.  Mostly above and around 20 Gw but with two predictable dips daily below 15 Gw around 8am and 9pm where solar and wind don't perfectly mesh.  That they mesh at all is some kind of miracle.  Without wind power there would be nothing* at night, and without solar there wouldn't be much to help with peak loads.  (*Except other renewable sources that haven't been well developed yet, including geothermal power and tidal power.)

At night, wind power carries more and more of the electric load in Texas, often reaching above 50% at wee hours 1-5am when the electric load is at its lowest.   Texas has 40Gw of installed nameplate wind capacity, so if the wind is really blowing we get all that.)  This isn't very useful for handling the midday air conditioning peak loads (solar power is best for that) but nevertheless it does save fuel as gas and coal power plants regularly burn much less at those times when wind is really cranking, which is handled by regulations, technical means, and a competitive electricity market.  Wind is the cheapest power source so it underprices everything else when there's lots of wind, saving fuel and reducing CO2 emissions.  The fuel and emissions savings don't depend on when the fuel is being saved.  If the wind isn't blowing 1-5am, dirtier sources must be used instead.

*Many many people don't understand that wind picks up at night in the central continental plain.  You see lots of articles saying that wind is stronger during daytime.  That may be true in a lot of places, but not in central North America.

Here is one authoritative source.

Here is a graph from that study.  Wind power is clearly greatest from midnight to 5am.

The complementary nature of wind and solar is something that I would never have expected.  For quite awhile I had been worried that wind wouldn't be all that useful, and that the whole RE paradigm might fail for lack of energy storage.*  I had often been cowed by the oft repeated statement that wind is intermittent.   But it's clear that the massive amount of wind power in Texas is being used quite effectively.  Wind Power is Real.  I still think it's a kind of miracle too.  The actual power source is a force of nature we are merely tapping.

(*We should be using only (or using much more) energy storage and demand reduction to deal with regular gaps in Renewable Energy (RE), instead of fossil power, and then even larger gaps.   Using fossil power more and more as just backup is much better than using it all the time.  We may need fossil backup for a long time.  It's imponderable to think of energy storage good enough to last for weeks of useless weather.  But the better fossil plants can be maintained or mothballed for typical or extreme emergencies as we meet more and more needs from low polluting technologies, like wind and solar power.)

We could use even more wind power effectively by shifting more energy uses (eg EV charging and energy intensive manufacturing) and even human activity to the late night hours.  That would especially make sense in Texas summers, having triple digit temperatures midday, meanwhile it's quite nice after midnight, typically upper 70's.  We should be sleeping in the daytime and stay up all night.  This is not a new idea.  (Nor, for that matter, is wind power.  It predates coal, gas, and nuclear. It powered ships in 4000 BCE.)

Opening up the Texas grid to the rest of USA would also help utilize even more wind power, for those areas which aren't lucky enough to have fairly consistent winds at night.

Some southern and coastal wind farms in Texas do the exact opposite of what I just described, peaking in mid day just like solar power.  Of course that's useful too...perhaps even more useful...as it helps with peak air conditioning loads.

Dueling Studies

 Here's a report on the 2017 study showing that Wind and Solar have way lower lifecycle emissions than coal, gas, or nuclear.

The report mentioned an earlier study which reached opposite conclusions.

I was shocked to learn that wind farms require more concrete than nuclear plants.  (And that nuclear plants require less concrete than coal plants.)  My own experience of nuclear plants is that they are very very big, as in measured in square miles.  But the pedestals that wind turbines sit on are massive, go deep into the ground, AND you need hundreds of them for a 1GW wind farm.  So that is a lot of concrete.  But the world already produces a lot of concrete every year for other things.

But all that concrete (and steel too) is still only a small part of lifecycle emissions, according to study linked above.

The Real History of the War in Ukraine

The Real History of the War in Ukraine, by Jeffrey Sachs.

 

What is NATO?

Proponents of NATO believe it is a Defensive Alliance, formed to deter aggression from Authoritarian States.

From it's inception, the USA was the primary power in the "alliance."  Why was the USA doing this, for the benefit of humanity?

Obviously, from the American perspective, NATO has always been an instrument of projecting US power, and suppressing/defeating/neutralizing potential competitors to US Imperialism, which has been globally hegemonic since the Dissolution of the USSR, and semi-hegemonic after the end of World War II.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya were no threat to NATO but NATO chose to decapitate and/or destroy them anyway.  Because they weren't following US dictats.  Syria and Yugoslavia were targeted because they were friendly to a key US competitor, Russia.

Fighting the rise of any competitor, and in particular Russia, has been the key US interest from the start.

Russia is a large country with a lot of potential as yet far from realized.  It's adjacency to both Europe and China in the modern long-supply-chain but increasing-transportation-costs world.  The longstanding US advantage in relative isolation from the rest of the world is looking, more and more, to become a disadvantage.

So, in the effort to retain global hegemony, US has been pulling out the stops to provoke wars with both Russia and China.

This is Organized Crime on a global scale.

It's not clear what the outcome will be.  The Crime Family may live to fight another day, and another day after that, but for how long is unknown.  Will human society collapse for other reasons first, or will The Empire and it's Enemies bring it down first?  But sooner or later, a crime syndicate has to fail, either before, after, or along with everything else, because, basically, it eats away at everything else which ultimately supports it.

This is the failure of every great empire which has come before.

The people of the US could choose to be something more sustainable.  What form that might take is unclear (of course, I recommend Communism).  But one thing is abundantly clear, it cannot be an empire.  That means an entirely different approach in many ways, and especially in less Finance and Military Industrial Complex.

And so, I oppose the very existence of NATO.

The Near Impossible Energy Transition

Great Post at NakedCapitalism outlining all the ways the Green Energy transition will be very, very difficult to achieve.  Unlike all energy transitions before, this one is not driven by increasing energy needs, but on decreasing the destructiveness of the current energy sources.  It will increase rather than decrease costs...of everything.

Bill S adds a good comment (though, personally, I hate emphasizing #1, but I admit it's probably needed):

1) Electrification of everything is not likely to be the solution, as indicated in Das’ essays. Liquid and gaseous fuels, whether derived from fossil sources, biomass or some other source, will be with us for the foreseeable future.

2) Radical conservation must be part any realistic solution. The whole world cannot bear the frivolous use of energy that is typical in the Anglosphere (and Europe, China, Russia, et al.) This does not have to mean a reduction of quality of life, tho’. It just means that we need to stop making tons of throw-away stuff and repair & reuse the stuff that we need. Fast fashion, yearly iPhone upgrades, bottled water and low-cost airlines, for example, should cease to exist. The private car will probably have to go as well – as it is a huge resource sink that spends most of its time in parking-lots and garages.

3) Stop the War Machine. This is a huge resource sink that produces huge GG quantities with little of benefit to humanity at large.

4) Destroy the Financialization Machine. Put finance back in its place as a facilitator of productive economic activity instead of an end in itself. IMHO, the idea that the goal of corporations is “making money for shareholders” instead of creating real wealth for the benefit of society as a whole is just insane. Financialization drives the whole extraction business and will not stop until either it is stopped or we are all consumed in the fire.

Given difficulties we face, amidst a huge global population and everything else, I can't fault China or others in principle for building some more fossil fueled sources at present.  We need to walk and chew gum at the same time.  (In specific cases, such as in the USA, I can say we could be doing much better.)

I could be wrong, but I can't imagine it happening before a major collapse of societies and populations, and collapse won't make it any easier either.

We need to try to make the transition as fast as possible, but also minimizing the environmental destruction it will require along the way.

We need to resist greenwashing, such as way oversized electric SUV's, and do the 'smaller' thing along with the renewable energy transition, if not even faster.  We should have started on smaller 70 years ago if not more.  (But then, the message was that "Electricity will be too cheap to meter.")

We need to avoid the kind of irresponsible and careless optimism that Das calls Micawberish.  Techo-optimists, cornucopians, and their ilk rely too much on hope.  Too often centrists do as well.  Meanwhile, perhaps half of the global population lives in ecocidal denial, aided by many who concoct bogus and/or cherry picked data to 'prove' that global warming is not happening.

However, we still have to have some hope there can be a good future for human and other lives, and that this is important.  We need just enough hope to get us to do all we can now (with an emphasis on the downsizing part first), but with a clear vision of the obstacles we face nevertheless.

In order to have that smidgeon of hope, we also have to hope that some new things we can't foresee will help, while it is also certain that some new things we can't foresee will make things worse.

Even though the situation appears hopeless, and we mustn't deny the problems involved, we can doubt that we know everything well enough to prove there is no hope.  That is where and how doubt is most useful.

It is better to light one candle, than to curse the darkness.

As I have long said.

(Often claimed to be an old Chinese proverb, that seems not to have been established.  The first known use is in a sermon published in 1907.  I learned it from Peanuts.)

*****

There are those who believe the adoption of EV's should proceed as fast as possible.  I may concur with that (though I'm not sure) but I'm pretty sure it won't happen fast anyway, and won't help much anyway, and will create many new problems regardless of speed.

Recently I've seen articles like this one, showing a vast difference (less than half as much) in lifecycle emissions from EV's as compared with conventional autos.

I'm troubled by the alleged low manufacturing cost of EV's.  In particular, I believe current EV's exist relatively cheaply on the back of an already existing lithium battery capacity.   Expanding that capability will be costly in money and environmental integrity.  And especially in the context of a new cold and/or hot war with both Russia and China.  China is currently the #1 producer of lithium in the world.  Lithium is widely available, but very environmentally costly to mine.  It's dirty as heck.  Americans don't much want to do it, they want others to do it.  That may work OK in a world that's not at war, and where we can only cheaply buy American in the future.

But rather than push the costs of lithium sky high, what's equally if not more likely is that they just won't materialize fast anyway.  New gas cars are unlikely to disappear by 2030.  That will be managed...politically....

Anyway, regardless of cost, there is the environmental cost of all the new mines and factories, or especially the ones that would be needed to meet ambitious goals.

I'm not sure how to weigh local vs global issues in these regards, I've suggested using the effect on species extinction.  But I suspect that's very problematic.

Also I'm not so sure about claims like the ones that EV's last 20% longer.  EV batteries certainly won't last as long as conventional cars, and when they fail there are many reasons why they might not be replaced, including that their technology may have become obsolete.  Gas cars can be run for decades with relatively low cost rebuilding.

Finally,  transportation* is only 29% of total emissions in USA (and generally even less elsewhere).  That means that 71% of the problem is unchanged by the electric transition.    Much if not most of our transition efforts should go into that 71%.

If only half of the 29% problem is solved by converting all transportation to electric (because it only cuts lifecycle emissions in about half--which I think is very optimistic in the near term decade or two because of all the new mining and manufacturing infrastructure needed), that means we are only solving 14.5% of the problem in doing so.

(*And just looking at personal vehicles, cars and light trucks, that part of the transportation sector is only 16.5% of total US emissions, so converting all personal vehicles to EV solves only 8% of the problem with US emissions, leaving 92% unsolved.)

Car emissions could also be drastically reduced with smaller cars and fewer driven miles, that probably ought to be the biggest focus.  But it's not how profits are made.

Even more radical solution, such as re-centering cities and deploying ubiquitous mass transportation, require even bigger (almost inconceivable) investment which would best take place over decades.  A conceivable long term is turning suburbia into small farms--what much of it was 75 years ago--with large quantities of the now suburban populations migrating back into city centers, served by mass transit.  

Ubiquitous personal transport is probably not a long term sustainable model in the context of eliminating CO2 emissions or handling other resources.  Cutting CO2 in half just isn't good enough, and all the extra manufacturing required will be economically and environmentally costly and on an ongoing basis.  Perhaps best to start thinking past it now.  We have to envision human society with much smaller energy consumption, which means high density urban living for most at anything like current global population levels.  Only those engaged in farming, mining, or similar activities should live far enough from city centers to require non-rail transportation (and perhaps most of that work should be done by robots first, simply for these reason).  Rail transportation, meanwhile, does not need large battery production, though it will require enormous investment in construction with social relocation being the biggest part.*

That kind of radical change would ultimately reduce other energy and CO2 costs.  But still, there will be far more to be solved, or at least resolved, such as military CO2 emissions.

(*A friend of mine, with whom I lived with for awhile in San Francisco, believed that for some reason, Americans couldn't run good rail systems.  There does seem to be some factual basis for that observation.  Meanwhile other countries who may fail in other ways, have wonderful rail transportation systems.  If true, that suggests yet another fundamental issue, perhaps requiring major social and institutional change which I couldn't define except by calling it Communism.)

The Purpose of Life

It's nearly obvious, I think now.  It took a moment's reflection to come up with this:

The Purpose of Life is to be part of it.

To take, and to give.

To enjoy, and to contribute to the the enjoyment of present and future living beings.

*****

Now, many schools of thought including nihilists, egoists, and conservatives generally (according to John K Galbraith, the conservate is engaging in man's oldest folly...finding the perfect justification for selfishness) have attempted to erase at least parts if not all of the "give" side of this.

On the other hand, people with much and varied experience have concluded that the give side is in fact the more important one.  We define ourselves in terms of what kind of contribution we make, for example.  The give side does inevitably live on forever, though our contribution to other people's lives, and thence what they do.

Sadly, the take side lives on forever as well, as our contribution to global warming, species destruction, etc.

 

Underestimating Russia

 From skepticalSOB at MoonOfAlabama:

Karl 12: “Russia is a dwarf. I will bring her to her knees.” 1707

After the battle of Poltava, Sweden lost the status of a great power.

Friedrich 2: “I will conquer backward Russia.” Mid 18th century.

In 1759 the Russians entered Berlin.

Napoleon: “Russia is a colossus with feet of clay. I will destroy it.” 1812

In 1814 the Russians took Paris.

Hitler: “I will conquer the USSR by the end of the summer of 41.” 1941

In 1945, Hitler committed suicide when the Red Army entered Berlin.

Hitler: “I will conquer the USSR by the end of the summer of 41.” 1941

In 1945, Hitler committed suicide when the Red Army entered Berlin.

Some apt words about US Imperialism

From commenters at MoonOfAlabama on June 7.   As quoted by Karl Sanchez at his blog, bevin says things I've been saying a bit more forcefully and (hopefully) hopefully, replying to a previous comment by too scents@82:

"...The underlying cause of the Ukrainian conflict has not yet been identified, yet alone addressed..."  too scents@82

The underlying cause of this-and every other conflict of the kind- is the US government's commitment to Full Spectrum Dominance. 

It really is as simple as that- the US government is the global equivalent of Organised Crime. And everywhere that it goes, from south east Asia to Europe, to Africa and Latin America, it recruits and trains the criminally inclined to work with it and for its objective which is to produce a Hell on Earth, in which a small class of exploiters devour the substance which humanity, in harmony with nature, produces.

The war in Ukraine, where victory is critical to humanity's future, is nevertheless little more than a sideshow in world wide struggle between imperialism, no longer masked as anything more than a criminal project, and life. Life demands balance, justice and love and abhors cannibalism which is the very essence of the criminality of Empire- a greedy minority surrounded by the bones and the shortened, blighted lives of those whom they have devoured.

What Biden is telling us, and those like him have been telling us with increasing confidence for eighty years, is that obvious breaches of law and morality no longer matter because the domination that the ruling class has over the world includes control of information and opinion, which means that the criminals have the ability to re-write the law to ensure that they cannot be identified as breaking it.

The US government has been breaking every rule in the book, reneging on every agreement it ever made and betraying both the letter and spirit of every law it runs into-domestically and internationally- since people started paying attention to its actions. And long before it sealed its independence in the C18th. It has always been a criminal conspiracy. But since 1945 it has ceased to pretend otherwise. And it's government has been taken over by the CIA, an institution which is not only out of but beyond control- it runs all three branches of government, the entire law enforcement system, the media, the internet, all means of communication and education. And is rapidly taking over every other government- it owns the UN for example. Its agents fill the legislatures across Europe- they command the armed forces of most of the world's military, and they are constantly beavering away, gnawing at the roots of the few power centres that it does not already control.

But there is hope, yet, in those countries which have hasd, over the centuries enough of imperialism-as its colonised objects- to teach them that there is one imperative in politics today, one precondition to the solution of mankind's many problems, and that is the defeat of the Empire and the re-education of the millions that it has corrupted.

This last will not be hard- the basis of imperialism is the belief that it is the winning side, once that is dealt with in the form of a comprehensive defeat, the Empire will expire with the whimpering of bullies and time servers learning that might is not right and that justice, the foundation of all physics and philosophy, will triumph or life will end.

Sanchez reports on the teleconference between Putin and the Security Council.   

And then he links to an editorial at Strategic Culture which reinforces what Bevin said.

Tempering Consequentialism

We start from too hard a place, I believe now, if the question is "Was the US entry into WW2 good for the world as a whole."

The question shouldn't exactly be "was it good for us" either.  Things might be good for us, at least before the bending of the arc of justice, but horribly unethical elsewhere.

Fundamentally, my opposition to the US participation in WW2 comes from two things:

1) I want to assert that sort of non-interventionism is always the best policy (and WW2 is one of the troublesome cases, one of the very few troublesome cases in my view).

OK, so that's not something I should brag about...it's my bias.  But also, there's this:

2) It destroyed the republic of the USA, turning it into a horrific hegemonic empire, costing 20-30 million lives elsewhere in the world since WW2 (not to mention millions of Americans).  One could say that as a US citizen I was responsible for those horrors (as much as I sometimes, anyway, tried to stop them).  It had a horrible effect on all aspects of American life, society, and culture.  We've been turned into a CIA fishbowl with ever increasing merging of corporate and government control...the infamous Military Industrial Complex which includes Media and many other things as well.  We lost an enormous opportunity to build on the kind of world JM Keynes envisioned, with ever decreasing work and increasing leisure (and thereby also...lower economic growth and destruction), and instead got the treadmill to endless global domination.  Working ourselves to death for endlessly bigger homes and cars and military budgets to prove we're on top.  And the violence that we employ on the rest of the world comes back to us both externally and internally.  It's a horror.

Would Germany have been different as hegemonic leader?  I think, in the long run, if they had momentarily conquered Europe, they would not have gotten farther, and they'd eventually give it up as well.  In the long run, they wouldn't have been able to wield as heavy a hand on the rest of the world as the US has ever since.  If US had not entered the war, the Holocaust as such would not have happened (it was specifically US involvement which made them fear the end might be near and chose the 'final solution'), instead the virtual enslavement of the few Jews who ultimately didn't resist the move to Palestine to escape from it.

(Likewise, Russia, if they had won without our help, they would have been so weakened as to not be able to wield a heavy hand on much of the world...and possibly it would have even been good for all.)

But that could be wrong and may be too hard a question to answer anyway.  Not only is it very very hard to know these things...how things would have worked out otherwise.  There's a clear limit as to what we, individually and collectively, are responsible for.  We are just not responsible for the actions of others.  We are responsible for our own actions, and that is pretty much it.

We had no mandate from God or anyone to save the world from Nazis, Communists, or anything else.  (And all that was simply cover anyway...for our own global domination of course!!!)

So perhaps the question that should be answered is the simplest one.

Was the US participation in WW2 essential in order for the US people to remain free and secure within the US?

And I'd venture it was not, though some have argued with even that.

The Lab Leak Theory

I never entirely dismissed it, and now I'm leaning more and more (but not entirely) towards believing the Lab Leak Theory of COVID-19 origins.  For me, this story gained much credence when Jeffry Sachs, who had been the head of the first official investigation of COVID origins, came out with a story supporting the idea (despite the first investigation concluding otherwise).  What concerned Sachs was that the details regarding unfunded research being done (at Wuhan, among other places) was not being provided to him.  He believed he was being stonewalled.

This is not to claim that the CPC designed COVID as a weapon against the west.  Or that the Chinese are more incompetent than average at doing risky research (although, it does appear Wuhan was not using the highest level of biocontainment that should have been used for all coronavirus research, especially for this preliminary and as yet unfunded research--for which there was insufficient funding).

Pretty much everyone who believes in the Lab Leak Theory now believes it was actually a consortium of US and China involved.  A US non-profit was directing the research.*  It was not doing this research in USA possibly because this particular kind of research (Gain of Function with Coronaviruses) was banned in USA for being too risky.  So it was really the fault of actors in the USA that this research was being done at all, and that they chose to do the research in China to evade the ban.

Here is one of the best complete accountings of the Lab Leak Theory.

In fact, it does involve unfunded research being done at Wuhan.  An earlier research proposal was rejected and Wuhan scientists were trying to find a modification that would get it funded, when several of the scientists involved got sick...

The lesson here is Be Careful and/or Avoid doing Risky Research.  We should honor that lesson even if it turns out the Lab Leak Theory is not true.

And to settle this question better, we really do need to bring both sides together for an open debate.  There are some critical questions, for example:

How do the coronaviruses that WIV was known to be working with differ from COVID-19?  We know that Wuhan was adding the Furin cleavage site to different coronaviruses.  But which coronaviruses, and are there actually (as claimed in the first analysis which claimed to disprove the Lab Leak Theory) differences between the SARS type coronaviruses that Wuhan was known to be working with and COVID-19.  Are the differences small enough that they could have arisen from mutation?  Or might the coronaviruses more like COVID-19 have slipped in by either mistake or design?

In short, we really do need to track down the information that Jeffry Sachs was looking for but couldn't get.

And while I am supportive of vaccines, especially COVID-19 vaccines, including Corbevax created by Peter Hotez, and I don't believe he has any need to debate RFK Jr on the subject of vaccines, Hotez was also involved in Gain Of Function research subcontracted to the same scientists in Wuhan as EcoHealth, and was among those on Sachs committee who believed the Lab Leak investigation was unnecessary.  He also reportedly did not report this obvious conflict of interest beforehand.

Here is Hotez and another scientist defending not debating with the likes of RFK Jr.  I agree with them on the vaccine subject, but it still would be good to have some kind of dialog on vaccines, perhaps with different interlocutors and a different moderator.  It need not be 'wide open' but at least deep enough to address issues that have been raised.  (I also have mixed feelings about climate scientist Michael Mann, who often discredits people like me--'doomers'--as being as bad or worse than denialists.  My attitude on doom is fairly simple.  Perhaps we are not doomed, but everything we know now sure looks like we are, and I think we should be realistic and not believe in hopium.)

*EcoHealth alliance and the University of North Carolina had sought a grant from DARPA to investigate adding furi.  And why was DARPA even funding research like this?  (Though, they were not alone, NIH was also funding Gain Of Function research before it was banned.)  It smells of Dual Use, something the US has been accused of doing in other DARPA funded overseas laboratories: designing bioweapons.  If anyone was designing bioweapons in the picture that we now see, it was the USA and not China.  But if the US was designing bioweapons, why was it doing that in the city of a long term competitor (and now 'official enemy').  One possible answer could be because they could.

The CIA Times

 Every major newspaper published in the USA is The CIA TImes, thanks to Operation Mockingbird, its successors, and oligarch control of US media, among other things.

But, The Byline Times really stands out, with endless uncritical pumping of Russiagate and other anti-Russian psyops.

Even the venerable The Nation, which has turned so hard against Russia since the death of Stephen F. Cohen (a scholar of Russia)  in 2018 that this year I have stopped renewing my subscription, gets blasted as a Russian shill evermore at TBT.

Now I know where to look when I want to see the other side.