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The Saker
A bird's eye view of the vineyard

offsite link Alternative Copy of thesaker.is site is available Thu May 25, 2023 14:38 | Ice-Saker-V6bKu3nz
Alternative site: https://thesaker.si/saker-a... Site was created using the downloads provided Regards Herb

offsite link The Saker blog is now frozen Tue Feb 28, 2023 23:55 | The Saker
Dear friends As I have previously announced, we are now “freezing” the blog.? We are also making archives of the blog available for free download in various formats (see below).?

offsite link What do you make of the Russia and China Partnership? Tue Feb 28, 2023 16:26 | The Saker
by Mr. Allen for the Saker blog Over the last few years, we hear leaders from both Russia and China pronouncing that they have formed a relationship where there are

offsite link Moveable Feast Cafe 2023/02/27 ? Open Thread Mon Feb 27, 2023 19:00 | cafe-uploader
2023/02/27 19:00:02Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of

offsite link The stage is set for Hybrid World War III Mon Feb 27, 2023 15:50 | The Saker
Pepe Escobar for the Saker blog A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you?re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by

The Saker >>

Public Inquiry
Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005

offsite link RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail?supporter? Anthony

offsite link Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony

offsite link Robert Watt complaint: Time for decision by SIPO Anthony

offsite link RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony

offsite link Waiting for SIPO Anthony

Public Inquiry >>

Human Rights in Ireland
Promoting Human Rights in Ireland

Human Rights in Ireland >>

Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link The Curious Links Between the Backers of the Assisted Dying Bill Wed Dec 11, 2024 07:00 | Charlotte Gill
The rushed passage of the Assisted Dying Bill, pushed through by powerful lobby groups, has left many wondering what's really behind the rush and who's pulling the strings, says Charlotte Gill.
The post The Curious Links Between the Backers of the Assisted Dying Bill appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link News Round-Up Wed Dec 11, 2024 01:11 | Richard Eldred
A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Pensioner Convicted of Incitement for Posting Negatively About Migrants in the Latest Politically Ch... Tue Dec 10, 2024 19:00 | Eugyppius
Eugyppius recounts the sad story of Doris van Geul, a 74 year-old pensioner fined for incitement after a Facebook post critical of migrants, with her conviction threatening to bankrupt her for the rest of her life.
The post Pensioner Convicted of Incitement for Posting Negatively About Migrants in the Latest Politically Charged German Speech Prosecution appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Storm Darragh Leaves U.K. Solar Farm in Pieces Tue Dec 10, 2024 17:00 | Richard Eldred
Storm Darragh has ravaged Anglesey's Porth Wen solar farm, tearing hundreds of panels from their mounts, shredding turbine blades and leaving a cleanup effort that will stretch well into 2025.
The post Storm Darragh Leaves U.K. Solar Farm in Pieces appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Justin Jellyby Tue Dec 10, 2024 15:00 | Peter Harris
Justin Welby, like Dickens's Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, is all charity abroad but blind to problems at home; now, even his apologies ring hollow, says Peter Harris.
The post Justin Jellyby appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Lockdown Skeptics >>

international / sci-tech Saturday April 18, 2020 20:14 by 1 of indy
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The rise of data centers and the cloud

In light of the slight interruption to normal life that is going on it is worth reassessing some of the known common knowledge about Big Tech and it's related area Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unless you have been asleep for the past 10 years, everyone will have heard of Edward Snowden who revealed in quite extensive detail the level of ongoing surveillance carried out jointly by the US and UK intelligence agencies, the NSA and GCHQ. Prior to his disclosure any suggestion of widespread spying was met with derision. Overnight the world changed and it was widely accepted as fact by everyone. What's more is that the depth and scale of the programs were far bigger than even the pessimists had imagined. It was this more than anything which has tarnished the reputation of technology as something that was always good to a demonstration of it's dark side. The state as such has dirtied its reputation with regards to technology.

international / rights, freedoms and repression Sunday April 05, 2020 23:11 by 1 of indy

The current shutdown of the economy and lockdown of society all around the world is unprecedented and it is very clear that the media are talking up the number and trying to instil panic and fear in the people. This is true not just in Ireland but everywhere else. What all the media reports have in common is that not a single one of them puts the numbers into perspective. All we see are league tables of infections and deaths for this country and others and how it is all going to get worse.

Update: The common flu causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness worldwide and kills up to 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organization


THIS IS HUGE: Stanford’s Antibodies Study Wraps Up, Shows Covid-19 Is 50x More Prevalent and 50x Less Deadly Than Believed
https://youtu.be/jGUgrEfSgaU

The purpose of this article is to introduce some rational discussion of these numbers and show how it all relates to each other.

Regular Yearly and Daily Deaths in Various Countries

So for example in the case of Ireland the headline screams today (Sat 4th Apr) 17 more deaths and 331 new cases for a total of 4,604. Anyone following the news will know this daily death rate has risen over the last week or so and 17 people is quite alot and brings the total so far to 137. So now we will put this in context.

Consider a country with a population of 100 million and in it, there are an equal number of people at each age group. And lets assume the number of people born is more or less the same as the number who die. This would mean a growth rate of zero percent. We know most Western countries have a growth of anywhere from 1% to 2%. So now assume most people in this country live on average for 100 years. In fact the average expectancy in Ireland is 81.5. But lets stick with 100 for now. Then if you only last 100 years this would mean in a population of 100 million that each year (which is 1% of 100 years) that 1% of the people die. Well 1% of 100 million is simply one million. Therefore the number of people who die per day is 1,000,000 / 365 or 2,739 people per day. Now applying this logic to the USA with a population of approximately 331 million means 3.3 million die a year or 9,068 deaths a day. Italy has a population of 60m. This would then be 600,000 per year or 1,643 per day and for Ireland with a population of 4.9 million, the above would suggest about 49,000 deaths per year.

international / environment Friday September 20, 2019 00:43 by 1 of indy

An earlier version of this article was written but unpublished back in 2008 and it has now been revised and published to take account of various changes since then.

The case is made for the provision of free public transport in every major town and city worldwide for a multitude of reasons. It has always been a good idea and should have been done a long time ago, but now with three major issues of our time; resource depletion, including oil, pollution and the climate crisis; they make it imperative that we move to such a system, both to conserve dwindling supplies of cheap energy, to reduce the use of vast mineral resources to make hundreds of millions of cars and to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions because climate change is happening faster than expected.

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Are buses the future instead of the electric car? Heresy?

The Earth's climate has turned out to be more sensitive and complex than anticipated as evidenced by the recent dramatic record breaking summer ice melts in the Arcticc1 in 2007, 2008, 2012 and basically every year since then. With such a large change in the albedo or reflectivity over a huge area of the Arctic, this signifies the jump into positive feedback of the climate system, although it is not the only positive feedback. Combined with preliminary reports that frozen methane is beginning to be released from the Arctic sea floor and tundra and given that methane is 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas, it is clear we are probably at the point of things running out of control. Emissions need to be cut drastically, starting about 20 years ago.

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Maybe global warming is happening after all ....
Arctic sea ice, going going,..gone?

Moving to free and well-designed public transport allows society to deal with these problems in the least disruptive manner and to do so in the most equitable way and it would increase the shared sense of everyone working together to cope with what are essentially going to be permanent problems. Free public transport is not the full solution but is definitely an important first step. Switching to public transport has the potential to achieve large scale reductions in fuel use and it can be done immediately without further research or perfection of any technology. The current status quo plan to replace all the petrol and diesel fuelled cars with electric ones still leaves us with the problem of massive resource usage, a replacement of oil wars for lithium wars, traffic congestion, deaths from air pollution , high accident rates and actually high energy use. It does not matter if the heavily promoted so called solution of producing millions of electric cars is run on renewable energy because it would require vastly more wind farms, solar farms and whatever else compared to a transport solution based on highly efficient, globally deployed free public transport system which would only require a fraction of energy and resources of a car based one.

national / politics / elections Thursday May 23, 2019 22:18 by 1 of indy
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These local elections on Fri 24th May are more important than ever. The reason is that up and down the country Fine Gael with help from Fianna Fail have allowed corporate vulture funds through various government breaks to them to buy up valuable tracts of land and to buy up thousands and thousands of apartments and homes. And the result is they are screwing people for rent. In this feature a case study for South Dublin of how they corporate takeover has occurred and driven prices sky high and priced out ordinary people from ever buying a house or apartment. Found out what is happening in your council area and how FG and FF councillors encourage this madness because it is happening in towns and cities all over the country.

national / eu Wednesday May 22, 2019 00:13 by 1 of indy

The European elections are this Friday on May 24th and there are good reasons to consider your vote very carefully because it does make a difference because practically every bit of law passed in the EU has to be adopted by Ireland at some point. It is a great way for politicans here to say the "EU forced us to..."
They said that one about the attempt to privatise water during that campaign.

It can be safely assumed that most people are for internet freedom, protection of the environment and in particular to live in places with unpolluted water, clean air and safe from exposure to toxic chemicals. These are all no brainers. In the area of military we have seen how years of bringing democracy to the Middle East by bombing them has resulted in devastation and huge waves of human refugees and immigration and time and time again the nefarious activities of the intellegence agencies of the big powers like USA, UK, France and NATO show them to be heavily linked to the various terrorist groups, via training, funding and weapons supply through third party countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar in order to disrupt and overthrown regimes they don't like. So do people really want Ireland to drop it's neutrality and get aboard these very costly military adventures and volunteer it's soldiers for basically ordained mass murder? At a guess, the answer is probably no.

So what have the present MEPs done in their last term in the European Parliament?

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Well for one the Fine Gael MEPs are consistently backed the corporate, pro-military, anti environment and internet censorship agenda whilst all the Left leaning and Sinn Fein MEPs have consistently been against corporate control, anti-military, pro-environment and for internet freedom. The only FF MEP managed to be absent for most of the votes mentioned here and it would seem, has been playing the line of being non-committal until the party gains more strength and can then openly go back to supporting the status quo. And least anyone is in doubt, the status quo is anti democractic and pro corporate domination of society. The sections below will give some examples but it should be clear that it by voting for FG you are voting against your own interests. The only reason anyone has ever voted for them or will is because the election marketing machine is so effective and marketing works extremely well. Just think of all the junk people constantly buy that they do not actually need.

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