All that glisters green is not gold...

The electric car market is reeling in Europe...Germany's electric car ambitions have taken another body blow as Swedish Northvolt declares bankruptcy in USA.

The massively taxpayer-subsidized gigafactory now under construction in Heide is in jeopardy and becoming a huge embarrassment for Germany's Socialist-Green government.
Northvolt, a Swedish battery manufacturer, is facing immense financial difficulties and has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. This filing has raised concerns about the future of Northvolt's battery plant now under construction near Heide, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

Construction of the Northvolt Drei battery factory near Heide began in March 2024 and it was planned to begin production in 2026.

"[He] is considering a plan to link a university's likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus"

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Trump NIH Pick Who Wants to Take On 'Cancel Culture' Colleges

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university's likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.

Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.

The UK is not prepared for Ukraine-level casualty rates, Alistair Carns has said. In case of an actual conflict, the UK would run out of soldiers in six months to a year, the British Ministry of Defence official in charge of personnel.

Carns is the under-secretary of State for veterans and people in the country's defense ministry. He raised concerns about the size of the British Army during an event at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank on Wednesday. He said:

"In a war of scale - not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine — our army, for example, on the current casualty rates would be expended — as part of a broader multinational coalition — in six months to a year."

He based this calculation on questionable Ukrainian claims that Russia was taking 1,500 casualties every day, which Moscow has described as closer to Kiev's actual losses.

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to publicly disclose more information underpinning its authorization of COVID-19 vaccines, after failing to persuade the court to end the public records lawsuit.

In a ruling, on Friday, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, ordered the agency to produce its "emergency use authorization" file to a group of scientists who wanted to see licensing information that the FDA relied on to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is long passed and so has any legitimate reason for concealing from the American people the information relied upon by the government in approving the Pfizer vaccine," wrote Pittman, appointed in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.

The Australian electricity grid is not-fit-for-purpose. And failure is being normalized.

Last Wednesday, during the near-miss of a blackout in Sydney, the AEMO spent $3,558,000 on "demand reduction" which means they paid productive industries to stop working to save the grid from a blackout. Translated: poor electricity users in New South Wales paid $3.5 million to businesses to do nothing, because the grid didn't have enough energy, and the people in charge really didn't want any embarrassing blackouts so close to an election.

So renewables are wonderful, clean and cheap but your workers, assets and capital will sometimes need to sit around and do nothing so we can stop some storms in the 22nd century.

In political spin, planned blackouts can also be called "Virtual Power Plants"

"Demand Management" is a smarmy marketing word for a lot of little Blackouts. In the lexicon of a failing grid, all the bad-words get tortured into iced doughnuts — if your company has agreed to be ready to shut down at a moment's notice on a warm day, that's not being on "Standby to Close", instead your business is a ""pre-activated" extra reserve."

In Renewable-World-Psychosis bad is good: your smelter used to make aluminum, but now you can sell "electricity use reduction" as well, and the AEMO (the grid manager in Australia) will call you a "Virtual Power Plant" too. Australian companies can now sell their own blackouts back to the grid. Neat eh?

Indeed, you and I are probably thinking about this all wrong — like electricity is a net good, and a dead smelter is a waste of space.

John Rolfe, Daily Telegraph

... AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told an energy planning and regulation Senate committee hearing that the market operator spent $3,557,700 on reducing demand to increase emergency reserves in NSW on Wednesday November 27 as a supply shortage took shape.

Mr Westerman indicated AEMO did not end up having to reduce Wednesday's demand by as much as first expected. But, in anticipation of a greater shortfall than eventuated, AEMO had "pre-activated" extra reserves.

Mr Westerman said the purchased electricity use reduction came from "virtual power plants", which were an "aggregation of ... smaller demand."

For what it's worth, which is not much, the large aluminium smelter Tomago, was not forced to shut down, but it was "pre-activated" and ready to close. Apparently, even though the cool weather change came through, they shut down that afternoon anyway, or perhaps they just gave up. Who could blame them?

Australians are not just paying companies to do nothing, they pay them to be ready to do nothing too. There's a part payment for the pre-activated companies, even if they don't have to switch off. It reflects the hassle of running an industrial outfit with your hand on the power lever, and your brain in the state of uncertainty. And that's the thing isn't it — no company is going to be more productive "on standby" than it is running full tilt. It's a stupid way to run a nation.

The Jewish state is intent on "physically destroying" Palestinians, Amnesty International has claimed

Human rights group Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, in a damning report released on Thursday.

Titled 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza', the document describes the "killing of civilians, destruction of civilian infrastructure, forcible displacement, the obstruction or denial of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid by Israel in Gaza" since October last year.

Hostilities between Israel and Hamas in the Palestinian enclave flared up when the militant group attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing around 1,100 people and taking more than 200 hostages. The massive military retaliation by Israel has claimed more than 44,5000 lives in the enclave, according to Gaza health officials.

The hope here is that facing the reality of moral collapse frees us of the delusion that fiddling with technocratic financial abstractions and policy tweaks can reverse moral collapse.

Ours is a technocratic culture with a short attention span, and so problems and solutions are understood to be 1) technocratic and 2) instant. The problem is something that can be distilled down to a spreadsheet, formula, algorithm or legalistic policy, and the solution is some modification of spreadsheet, formula, algorithm or legalistic policy: all our problems will go away if we just end the Fed, switch to cryptocurrency, tweak some laws, get rid of the bankers, eliminate an agency, and so on.

These solutions will offer immediate relief. The problems will start melting away the minute we modify the spreadsheet, algorithm, financial settings or legal code.

But what if the problem is the collapse of integrity and honor, a moral rot that has consumed the foundations of our social order? If this is the root problem, then technocratic-financial solutions are the equivalent of excising a wart from the big toe and declaring that as a result of this procedure, the brain cancer has been cured.

Commentary taken from Robert Bogdansky's podcast "Coistotne" via Salon24.

The climate around climate change is changing. Just a few months ago, stating that achieving so-called climate neutrality by European countries is not only utopian but also devoid of economic sense would place the speaker in the group of dangerous populists Just a few months ago, this speaker would be considered not all that far [from] fascism and someone who could only be reasoned with while on trial in a court of law.

And today? Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said at the last climate conference in Baku that "climate goals" are contrary to the development of the European economy and threaten the prosperity of the inhabitants of the continent. One of the most famous German economists, Hans-Werner Sinn, stated in a recent interview that achieving zero emissions by Germany is a "utopian" goal that can only be achieved at the cost of deindustrialization. He called the regulations issued to achieve this utopia "trash." And what? And nothing. Sinn is still an authority for Germans. The Greens will probably attack him, but their time is running out.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is under fire today for seemingly dismissing medical concerns over the risks of puberty blockers and gender surgeries for minors with a comparison to taking Aspirin. In the oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, Sotomayor pointed out that there are risks to any medical procedure or drug. However, the analogy belittled the concerns of many parents and groups over the research on the dangers of these treatments. It also highlighted how the Biden Administration and liberal justices were discarding countervailing research inconveniently at odds with their preferred legal conclusion.

The Biden administration is challenging Tennessee's law banning gender-changing drugs and procedures for minors. That state cites studies that indicate serious complications or risks associated with the treatments for children.

While the conservative justices acknowledged studies on both sides of the debate over risks, the liberal justices seemed to dismiss studies that were inconsistent with striking down the law as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. That issue produced a difficult moment for Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito confronted her about statements made in her filing with the Court.

As President-elect Donald Trump assembles a cabinet that will be tasked with implementing policy change at the federal level, individual state governments are plotting their own policy responses.

California Governor Gavin Newsom is organizing a coalition of blue states to resist the "Make America Great Again" agenda.

Democrat governors aim to, for example, defend sanctuary cities against immigration enforcement efforts, impose their own "clean" energy mandates, and retain funding for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs that could be targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, red state governors are largely vowing to work with President Trump to help him implement his agenda.

But however hopeful Trump backers may be for sweeping reforms, the incoming administration will face roadblocks from Congress, the courts, and the entrenched bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.