U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky

From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

A new report published by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, highlights more than $1 trillion worth of taxpayer money spent on projects that he argues wastes and abuses taxpayer money.

Tucked in the report are three programs funded by federal agencies using millions of taxpayer dollars to experiment on cats.

The details are explicit and gruesome.

$11 million on Department of Defense “Orwellian cat experiments”

The US Department of Defense spent nearly $11 million on “Orwellian cat experiments” that have nothing to do with training the U.S. military or national defense.

“When George Orwell wrote 1984, he couldn’t have imagined the bizarre, dystopian reality we find ourselves in today where tax dollars are being spent to shock cats into having erections and defecating marbles. Yes, you read that correctly,” the report states.

Through the DOD’s, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), $10,851,439 of taxpayer dollars were allocated to the University of Pittsburgh to conduct “grotesque and extremely invasive experiments on cats.”

This involved slicing open the backs of male cats to expose their spinal cords and inserting electrodes to send electric shocks “to make cats have an erection.”

The cats were then subjected to “even more electric shocks, sometimes for up to 10 minutes at a time, before having their spinal cords severed to paralyze their lower bodies,” the report states. “And just for good measure, the shocks continued for another 10 minutes. All this, in the name of ‘science.’”

In another DARPA-funded experiment, balloons were inserted into the cats’ colons and marbles into their rectums “to force these poor animals to defecate the marbles via electric shock.”

“Nothing says ‘national defense’ quite like torturing cats to poop marbles,” the report notes. “If we can’t stop the government from shocking cats into defecating marbles, then what can we stop?”

$2.24 million on feline COVID experiments

The report also notes that under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci, since 2022, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated $2.24 million in grants to Cornell University to conduct feline COVID experiments.

Through a University of Illinois NIAID subgrant, Cornell received $1.59 million over the past two years in addition to a $650,000 USDA grant, bringing the total to $2.24 million, the report notes.

The experiments led to the suffering and death of 30 cats, according to the records of the experiments, the report notes.

The experiments involved injecting healthy cats with COVID-19, observing them suffer and then killing them in groups of four. The cats were not given any type of vaccine or treatment but killed as early as two days after being injected and left isolated in cages.

NIAID funding for the program is slated to continue through 2025; the USDA’s through May 2026, the report notes.

“It’s a mystery as to why the U.S. government continues to fund these barbaric types of studies, especially when the knowledge gained is either useless to society or could be learned without torturing an animal,” the report states.

$1.5 million to torture primarily female kittens

The National Institutes of Health spent more than $1.5 million to torture primarily female kittens in an extreme example “of waste and cruelty,” the report found.

“If you learned that your money is being used to electro-shock young kittens, torturing them for hours on end, and to the point that they vomit, would you believe it?” the report asks. “Since 2019, $1,513,299 worth of taxpayer money has been going to these medieval-type experiments. This is not some distant, dystopian future; it’s happening right now at the University of Pittsburgh, courtesy of a grant from the NIH.”

According to the report, primarily female kittens between four and six months old were strapped to a hydraulic table, spun 360 degrees, flashed with bright lights, injected with copper sulfate, had holes drilled into their skulls, to be “shocked, and abused without resistance.”

According to NIH, the purpose of the experiments is to study how different species, like cats and monkeys, respond to motion sickness. Understanding responses to the test “could have implications for human health, potentially aiding in the treatment of conditions like vertigo or helping us understand the effects of space travel on the human body,” the report states.

The report cites primary sources and includes photographs of the animals and diagrams of the machines used.

From EnergyNow.ca

By Irina Slav

The facts behind energy transition are so staggeringly counter to common sense that the only way to achieve them is by force, and the only path ahead is failure.

I was going to wrap this eventful year with a nice little post of gratitude  but, as usual, the news flow has forced me to revise my plans. So much has happened in the last week days failing to report on it would be a real shame. You may want to put down the hot beverage or, then again, not put it down, you’re the master of you.

A few years ago, during some election campaign or other — we’ve had so many it’s hard to keep track — one of the most popular parties in Bulgaria chose as its slogan “Work, work, work!” Naturally, the slogan became the butt of many jokes almost immediately.

More recently, we were graced with the “Fight! Fight! Fight!” adage from the Trump campaign that was nowhere near as amusing. It also worked. Meanwhile, the transition army is moving fast towards a “Force! Force! Force!” stage in its efforts to keep the green ball rolling.

Consider the latest gem from the International Energy Agency, out this week. The press release for the report was headlined Global coal demand is set to plateau through 2027, with the subheader summary stating that “New IEA report finds that strong deployment of renewables is set to curb growth in coal use even as electricity demand surges, with China – the world’s biggest coal consumer – remaining pivotal.”

What the report actually admitted, however, was that coal supply and demand hit an all-time high this year, they are both likely to scale new highs next year and keep going in that direction until at least 2027. The way things are going with the transition, coal will probably continue growing beyond 2027 as well because much as Fatih and the Transitionettes want it to die, they can’t tell China and India what to do — or anyone else, really, when push comes to shove.

Push appears to have come to shove in Canada already, with the federal government suddenly deciding to walk back its plan for a net-zero grid by 2035. Now, it will be aiming for a net-zero grid by 2050, which is what is going to be happening elsewhere as well —except perhaps in the UK, where everyone’s gone truly insane but more on that later.

So, Canada last week released something called Clean Electricity Regulations that originally, I gather, were supposed to outline plans to remove hydrocarbons from its already pretty green grid by 2035. The provinces, however, objected. And they must have objected strongly enough for an ounce of sanity to crawl into the regulations. Resource minister Jonathan Wilkinson of “We are not interested in investing in LNG facilities” fame called it “flexibility”. Whatever works to make one feel good, I guess.

Here’s a fun fact: the new Clean Electricity Regulations with the revised target come out literally days after the Trudeau government pumped up its emission cut plan, aiming for cuts of 45-50% from 2005 by 2035. All it took was six days and the start of what might end up being complete government meltdown to reconsider that deadline and delay it by 15 years. But stranger things have happened and some are happening right now, one of them at the U.S. Department of Energy.

The regulator of the department, Inspector General Teri Donaldson said in an interim report that the loan office of the DoE should stop giving out loans to green project developers on suspicion of conflicts of interest, or, as Reuters put it, “contractors who vet them may be serving both the agency and potential borrowers.”

From Donaldson’s report: “The projects funded with this authority, which involve innovations in clean energy, advanced transportation, and tribal energy are inherently risky in part because these projects may have struggled to secure funding from traditional sources such as commercial banks and private equity investors.”

Yet these same projects got DoE funding, which naturally raises the question of whether this funding success was at least in part related to the department’s failure to ensure everyone involved in the process was impartial and driven exclusively by professional motives, and I cannot believe I managed to put this stinky situation so delicately.

Anyway, the DoE has struck back immediately, saying the report was full of errors, and accusing Donaldson of “fundamentally misunderstanding” the “implementation of contracting in the Loan Programs Office.” Yeah, that must be it. That’s why she was appointed Inspector General of the department — but by the Trump administration so it doesn’t count.

All of this, however, is pretty weak beer compared to what’s been happening in Europe. VW is not yet bankrupt and the lights are still on in Germany, for the time being, but in the UK, the government has apparently found a way to grow money on trees because the grid operators of the three constituent parts of the UK’s bigger island are planning to spend 77.4 billion pounds on grid upgrades with a view to accommodating more wind and solar into said grid.

The upgrade is a must if Labour’s 2030 decarbonization plan is to have a fighting chance even though the outcome of that fight is already clear and it rhymes with beet, feet, and meat. The money is to be spent between 2026 and 2031, which means that the money trees take two years to start bearing fruit.

Yet here is my concern: with every other form of plant life susceptible to the devastatingly catastrophic effects of climate change, who is to guarantee that the money trees will be spared the devastating catastrophe? No one, that’s who. The UK may fail to accomplish its task of decarbonizing the country’s grid because of the very climate change it wants to neutralize with that decarbonization, and how cruel of an irony is that? Very, is the answer.

Usually, the UK government is difficult to rival in insanity and anti-intelligence but this week we have a serious contender and it’s not Germany’s government. It’s Big Oil and the heavy industry. That’s right. Europe’s energy and heavy industries have been driven to insanity by the climate crusade army although I’d stop short of painting them as innocent victims.

They could have said something. They should’ve said something. And they should’ve said it loud and clear. But they didn’t, so now Big Oil and Big Heavy Industry are asking the EU to force — that’s right, force — consumers to buy their transition cost-loaded products. Because there is no other way of selling those products.

““We will need to focus on demand creation to achieve new investment prospects,” executives from the two sectors said in a letter to Wopke Hoekstra, EU climate commissioner, warning of an “industrial exodus” without intervention,” the FT reported this week.

It also reported that “companies trying to invest in production methods that may result in lower carbon emissions are “pricing themselves out of the market” due to high costs, and authorities need to step in to create demand for their products.” I think this is beautiful, in the same way that an orca catching its pray is beautiful, that is, in a rather terminal way.

I don’t normally like to brag about being right about things, not least because it’s invariably bad things I’m right about, so it is with a sigh of frustration and some boredom that I have to note I have been saying this for two years now — and of course I haven’t been the only one, far from it. The only way for the energy transition to work is through force, and a lot of it. The only way for the transition to work is to eliminate all alternatives to the Chosen Tech, and for some reason Big Oil and the heavy industry seem to believe this is a constructive approach to life, the universe and everything.

What I find most interesting in this situation is the fact that it is extremely easy to find evidence the forceful approach tends to result in outcomes that are the exact opposite of the intended ones. History is full of such evidence. Yet it appears the most essential industries for modern civilization have taken the green “It will work this time” pill and are eagerly digesting it. Which means two things we already knew: one, the transition is doomed as it has been from the start; and two, Europe’s going down unless it uses a fast-closing window to come to its senses. We all know it won’t — unless it’s forced to. Work, work, work, force, force, force, fight, fight, fight.

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