Digging, melting, supplementing and suing the most Green, cliff-dwelling, supplemental and despicable fakeries in the week’s fake news.
Not-so-clean electric cars
Credit President Donald Trump for introducing to us the concept that there are “sh**hole” countries. Why there are is a conversation for another day, but clearly there are, and one for which there are few rivals is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This is a remarkable feat, given that DR Congo is extremely rich in natural resources — including one of the most sought-after natural elements in the world: cobalt. It’s also rich in copper and diamonds — and we know every girl wants a diamond or two or more.
Despite these riches, DR Congo descended from its ranking as the second-most industrialized country in Africa in 1960 to 176th of 187 countries for level of human development in 2018, according to the Human Development Index.
We all know why the world wants copper and diamonds. That’s self-evident. But what about cobalt? It’s long been used as pigment to make blue colors for painting, glass, etc. And it has radiological uses as well. But that’s not what makes it so important today. So, what does?
One, it’s a critical element in super alloys used in everything from prosthetics to jewelry. Two (and most important), it’s a crucial ingredient in lithium-ion batteries that are used to power cell phones, tablets and computers… and — something on the minds of Greens everywhere — electric cars.
The Sunday Times of London last month ran an article (hidden behind a paywall) highlighting the deplorable conditions of the DR Congo cobalt mines. It was picked up and reprinted in part by The Global Warming Policy Forum, a site run by “climate change skeptic” Dr. Bennie Peiser.
The article details the deplorable conditions of the mines. They look “like human anthills” and use both adult and child laborers wielding spades and picks and pouring yellow water from yellow jerrycans to dig into the mud in search of cobalt for multinational corporations — mostly Chinese.
DR Congo supplies about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, and at least 20 percent of it comes from so-called “artisanal” mines that are operating without any safety practices or oversight of any kind. When accidents occur, they are covered up because the multinationals don’t want what little government there is in the DR Congo to come take over the mines.
The story itself is not fake news. These mines, tragically, do exist. Children as young as 9 work in them — often under compulsion and sometimes at the point of a gun. And the conditions are deplorable. But the Sunday Times headline, “Congo’s miners dying to feed the world’s hunger for electric cars,” is fake news.
There is no “world hunger” for electric cars. Outside of a few leftist environmentalists and status-seekers they wouldn’t be attractive at all if not for massive government subsidies both to the carmakers and to the car buyers because they would be completely unaffordable. They’re highly impractical outside of urban areas because of their short ranges.
The only “hunger” for electric cars comes from imperatives being imposed upon us by central planners who have either ignorantly bought into the global warming scam, or who have a vested interest in “green technology” companies.
The Greens tell us that electric cars are much cleaner than gas- and diesel-powered cars, despite evidence to the contrary. And I’m certain those poor, exploited Congolese don’t think it’s very clean.
The great walrus plunge hoax
Sir David Attenborough is a British broadcaster who has provided us with some stunning documentaries on wildlife and the natural processes of the planet Earth. His Life on Earth series that began in 1979 on BBC became the standard by which nature documentaries were judged. But it seems that Attenborough’s latest work, Our Planet, airing on Netflix, is peddling some fake news.
It’s not surprising that Attenborough is a climate alarmist. It’d be surprising if he wasn’t, given his pedigree. But it’s astonishing that he’d jump this far into pushing a climate change narrative that can be so easily debunked.
On a recent episode, behind graphic footage of walruses plunging to their deaths from sea cliffs, Attenborough stated that the walruses were falling off cliffs because they had been forced on shore by declining sea-ice levels caused by global warming. Their poor eyesight, Attenborough’s documentary alleged, prevented them from seeing well enough to know they were about to go off a cliff.
According to Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford, this is fake news.
“We have records of walrus haulouts that are nearly a century old, including some from this part of the Arctic,” according to Crockford. “The idea that walruses are being driven on shore by sea-ice decline is entirely incorrect. They have always done so. In fact, there are reports of walruses falling over cliffs from long before the age of global warming too. Sir David’s story about climate change appears to be just that — a fable.”
And it seems there’s another problem with the Attenborough footage. Crockford claims it comes from a well-documented incident in the Russia where a pack of polar bears drove dozens of walruses over a cliff so they could feed on the corpses.
So, enjoy Attenborough’s latest Netflix documentary for its photography, but be prepared to be inundated with fake news if you listen to the commentary.
According to Crockford, “Our Planet is a thinly-veiled fundraiser for WWF (World Wildlife Fund), and it seriously misleads the public. We need to ask who knew the truth, and when.”
It probably wasn’t the vitamin D
Big Pharma mouthpiece Vanessa Chalmers, health reporter for U.K. Daily Mail online, delivered some interesting pro-pharma propaganda via an article about a Canadian man who developed kidney failure after sunbathing for eight hours a day while daily taking 8,000 international units of vitamin D.
According to the reporterette, the unnamed man had been taking vitamin D at the direction of a naturopath. The alternative health practitioner had instructed him to take eight drops of a particular vitamin D supplement that contained 500 IU per drop. That 4,000 IU dose is the maximum recommended by the U.K.’s National Health Service.
But the man mistakenly bought a bottle that contained 1,000 IU per drop. When taking eight drops he was getting a daily dose of 8,000 IU. He then went on vacation and began sunbathing for eight hours a day. The natural vitamin D his body produced from sunbathing combined with his 8,000 IU daily dose caused him to overdose on vitamin D, Chalmers alleges.
Chalmers alleges the large doses of vitamin D led to a rise in the man’s creatinine levels, causing him to be hospitalized. One year later, the man is said to be dealing with stage 3B chronic kidney disease, but his vitamin D and creatinine levels have returned to “normal.”
This is fake news. If you read carefully, Chalmers tells us 18 paragraphs in that the man was taking medicine for high blood pressure (likely a statin, though it doesn’t say which one) and a diuretic. Among the side effects of statins and diuretics are… elevated creatinine levels and kidney failure.
It’s difficult but not impossible to get too much vitamin D. Most people are vitamin D deficient, and the daily recommended dose is so conservative that unless you have certain rare medical conditions you could never overdose on the recommended daily dose.
According to the Vitamin D Council, a blood test to measure your 25(OH)D levels can determine if your vitamin D levels are too high. But it’s unlikely your levels are too high unless you:
- Take more than 10,000 IU/day (but not equal to) every day for three months or more. However, vitamin D toxicity is more likely to develop if you take 40,000 IU/day every day for three months or more.
- Take more than 300,000 IU in a 24-hour period.
The Vitamin D Council recommends supplementing 1,000 IU a day for infants; 1,000 IU per 25 pounds of body weight for children; and 5,000 IU per day for adults. But doses of 10,000 IU per day for adults are acceptable, according the Vitamin D Council.
Big Pharma hates holistic, naturopathic and natural health practitioners. That’s because Big Pharma is afraid people will learn that drugs don’t cure anything, they just mask symptoms and create more.
Vitamin D supplementation, on the other hand, provides innumerable health benefits, from fighting cancer to reversing bone and muscle loss to staving off Alzheimer’s and dementia. It also raises your natural immunity.
So don’t buy the anti-supplement propaganda. It’s fake news.
Truth finally catches up to Harry Reid
Harry Reid has retired from the Senate and dropped off the radar, much to our delight. One would have to look far and wide to find a more despicable human being to ever serve in the Senate. Oh, wait, we forgot about Chuck Schumer. OK. One would have to look far and wide to find more despicable human beings in the Senate than Reid and Schumer. Umm. I forgot about John McCain. One would have to look far and wide to find more despicable human beings to ever serve in the Senate than Reid, Schumer and McCain. Oh wait, there’s Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander, Christopher Murphy, Jeff Flake, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Kennedy… Come to think of it, there have been and currently are a lot of despicable human beings in the Senate, so we’ll move on.
Anyway, recall that as Reid departed, he was sporting dark glasses to cover up the damage to his eye he suffered in an “accident” at his home during a Senate recess. We speculated at the time that some mob boss he was working for might have beaten him up, or it could have been that he was looking to revive his boxing career and went full “Rocky.” Or, perhaps evil was just eating away at his face.
Turns out he fell while exercising, and then he sued the maker of the exercise equipment he was using when he fell. And true to his nature, Reid couldn’t help but lie about it.
A few months after the 2015 accident that left Reid blind in one eye, he said in a news conference that he was “doing exercises that I’ve been doing with the large rubber bands, and one of them broke.”
In his lawsuit against the makers of the TheraBand exercise bands he was using when he fell, Reid’s lawyers claimed, “While in use, the TheraBand broke or slipped out of Mr. Reid’s hand, causing him to spin around and strike his face on a cabinet.” Anyone paying attention can see that those are two very different scenarios.
That didn’t go unnoticed by lawyers representing the exercise band makers.
Under oath in court, when asked about his initial statements after the accident, Reid testified “I never thought the band broke.” He went on to say, “I said that, but I was just talking. Everybody knew it didn’t break. … In my concussion state, I could have said anything for the first few months.”
I guess that’s his excuse for his lies about Mitt Romney not paying taxes for 10 years, that there was a loss of 8 million jobs during the George Bush presidency, and that for about 30 percent of women, Planned Parenthood “is their (only) health care.”
After hearing that Reid let the bands slip from his hands and that the bands didn’t break, the jury found in favor of the makers of Theraband and against Reid.
Guess he finally got his comeuppance.
