Today is the 6th of January.
An international study suggests New Zealand is underestimating the damage caused by volcanos.
The study, from Geophysical Research Letters, analysed ash deposits at the Ubehebe crater in California, United States.
One of the study's authors, University of Otago volcanology professor James White, said the Ubehebe crater was familiar.
Officials underestimate many things.
Trade Me search data might have cracked the question of what comes first - the chicken or the egg? Turns out, it's the chicken.
Interest in online auctions for chickens has more than doubled amid a nationwide egg shortage.
Trade Me spokesperson Ruby Topzand said searches for chickens, coops and feed had risen to more than 21,400 in the past week - up from 9300, a 129 percent increase.
Supply and Demand hard at work.
Some foreigners have now been banned from purchasing residential property in Canada, according to a new law that took effect on 1 January.
The controversial measure has been enacted to relieve pressure on the housing market and make housing more affordable for Canadians.
With housing affordability in Australia described by some as a housing “crisis”, would a similar policy alleviate some pressure on the local market?
Canada’s two-year ban stops foreign buyers (with exceptions for refugees and permanent citizens) from purchasing residential properties in Canada’s cities.
The same Canada that let in 430,000 "New Canadians" in 2022.
At the end of the day, housing depends on resources, when a resource becomes scarce (be it land, materials, labour, etc), prices go up. And, I am sure there are still plenty of loop holes.
Ottawa intended to welcome 431,645, a goal that has been reached, surpassing the previous year's record of more than 401,000 immigrants."Today marks an important milestone for Canada, setting a new record for newcomers welcomed in a single year," Fraser said. "It is a testament to the strength and resilience of our country and its people."
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) processed approximately 5.2 million permanent residency applications in 2022, more than double the number from 2021.
Canada's goal for 2023 is 465,000 immigrants, increasing to 485,000 in 2024, then 500,000 in 2025, with an emphasis to be placed on skilled workers.
Freshly trained doctors, police officers and firefighters do not grow on trees. Neither do many other forms of infrastructure. Expanding a society at such a rate is train wreck waiting to happen.
Long gone are the days of suffocating niceness from our northern cousins. Now, professionals who disagree on social media with Canada’s ruling elite find themselves ruthlessly threatened by institutions that are meant to stand for liberty of thought.
That ‘stuffy’ and outdated value is scorned by the younger generation who prefer the comfort of ‘approved truth’ and safe nests feathered with media ‘consensus’.
While most Western regimes find themselves under attack from a mixture of neo-Marxism, eco-fascism, gender extremism, and whatever ‘ism’ TikTok culture involves – it is Canada that leads the way on policing ‘wrongthink’. They have readily embraced the insidious idea that the government and its bureaucracies have a right to ‘re-educate’ those who dissent.
I guess people like kicking hornet nests and all.
One of the most brilliant is a mouse called Jikky, a whistleblowing rodent from the CSIRO laboratory in Geelong where scientists research animal diseases and biosecurity, and have collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronaviruses.
Just after Christmas, Jikky (whose pronouns are mouse/mouseself) revealed that documents released by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in response to two freedom of information (FOI) requests show that of the 382 batches of Covid vaccines monitored by the TGA, 10 are associated with multiple deaths. Moreover, of these ‘death’ batches, four appear to be contaminated with unexplained fragments of mRNA and five of these ‘death’ batches had had their shelf life extended by up to 11 months.
Rebecca Weisser has done some excellent write ups lately and this one certainly does not disappoint.
Seeing Jikky getting a well deserved mention is just lovely.
Worth reading in full.
Last June, a paper by a team that included the British Medical Journal editor Peter Doshi concluded that data from the Pfizer and Moderna trials indicated their vaccines are more likely to put people in hospital from adverse effects than keep them out by protecting against Covid, by 2.4 and 6.4 people per 10,000, respectively. They concluded:
The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious Covid-19 outcomes such as hospitalization or death
Another peer-reviewed study, published in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics on 5 December, looked at the net benefit-harm ratio of a third vaccine for 18–29 year olds (that is, university students). According to its findings, for every one Covid hospitalisation prevented in this group by an mRNA booster shot over a six-month period, 18.5 serious adverse events would occur, including 1.5-4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).
An on-going series by Ramesh Thakur.
The two fake doctors, whose accounts urged extreme caution about Covid-19, were part of a network of at least four fake accounts that touted their ties to the LGBTQ+ community, vocally advocated for mask-wearing and social distancing, and dished out criticism to those they felt were not taking the pandemic seriously.
The Honeymans could not be reached for comment, as they do not exist. At publication time, Robert Honeyman’s account was no longer active.
Never take social media at face value.
Dr. Yusuf Saleeby has practiced medicine for more than 30 years. He serves patients in South Carolina and until recently had never faced an investigation from his state medical board.
But after Saleeby started prescribing ivermectin to his patients, he was reported to the board, which opened an investigation, despite the state’s attorney general’s promise that his office wouldn’t prosecute doctors who prescribed off-label medications.
Jennifer Wright, a nurse practitioner and clinical director who practices in Florida, but can prescribe across state lines, told The Epoch Times she received a letter from the Office of the Attorney General of New York ordering her not to prescribe ivermectin.
“You know, basically threatened me. If I don’t stop prescribing, then they’re going to fine me,” Wright said about the letter, which threatened legal action with fines of up to $5,000 per violation.
Debating wether Ivermectin works for Covid is not relevant, the fact is that politics and vested interests got in the way of the doctor / patient relationship in many Western nations.
Atleast the TGA and Medsafe did not make cringy horse jokes.
One of the most significant cultural transformations of the last two years has been the newfound glorification of the pharmaceutical industry.
An industry plagued by decades of fraud, corruption, and criminality managed to quickly rebrand itself as the savior of humanity during the covid-19 crisis.
But nothing inherently changed. Big Pharma still values shareholders’ profits more than people’s lives.
The regulatory agencies still operate as revolving doors to the pharmaceutical giants they are said to regulate.
Big Pharma still dominates lobbying efforts in Washington DC and spends billions each year advertising pharmaceutical products.
If you rotate the Pfizer logo, you can see their motivation.
"Shekels" one hell of a drug.
Yet another Head Girl insists that nobody should be held personally responsible for catastrophic policies that ruined millions of lives and unleashed unprecedented economic chaos.
Alena Buyx works really hard and believes extremely passionately in all the things that all the other people around her believe.
The German Ethics Council is an independent advisory body which has existed in some form since 2001, and which has a mandate to advise the government especially on matters of bioethics. It met its first serious test during the Corona era, when the entire political and bureaucratic leadership decided that the best way to respond to SARS-2 would be to commit massive human rights violations. Naturally, the Ethics Council not only failed to oppose these extraordinary policies, but supported them wherever possible.
Just like our Human Rights Commission.
From 2014:
TempleOS is more than an exercise in retro computing, or a hobbyist's space for programming close to the bare metal. It's the brainchild—perhaps the life's work—of 44-year-old Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions. For more than a decade Davis has worked on it; today, TempleOS is 121,176 lines of code, which puts it on par with Photoshop 1.0. (By comparison, Windows 7, a full-fledged modern operating system designed to be everything to everyone, filled with decades of cruft, is about 40 million lines.)
He's done this work because God told him to. According to the TempleOS charter, it is "God's official temple. Just like Solomon's temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted." God also told Davis that 640x480, 16-color graphics "is a covenant like circumcision," making it easier for children to make drawings for God. God demands a perfect temple, and Davis says, "For ten years, I worked on programming TempleOS, full time. I finished, basically, and the last year has been tiny touch-ups here and there."
I hope you are doing well up there Terry.
Earlier today, Creative Technology announced that Sim who was its Chairman and CEO passed away [pdf] yesterday at the age of 67. The role of interim CEO has since been assumed by the President of the Creative Labs Business Unit, Song Siow Hui while the company’s Lead Independent Non-Executive Director, Lee Kheng Nam has taken over as the acting Chairman.
After Sim established Creative Technology as a computer repair shop back in 1981, the company has then developed a series of PCs called Cubic between 1984 to 1986. However, things only picked up a few years later with the introduction of the Sound Blaster sound card in 1989.
Many a DOS gaming session, was made amazing by having an Sound Blaster card. Thank you.
One of the world’s most prestigious machine learning conferences has banned authors from using AI tools like ChatGPT to write scientific papers, triggering a debate about the role of AI-generated text in academia.
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, “Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference’s organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking.
In fairness, GPT is more then a "spellchecker".
