I found the source for Trump's well-founded fear of an auto industry bloodbath

 CNBC reports today:

Why a small China-made EV has global auto execs and politicians on edge :

There’s fear among global automakers that Chinese rivals like the Warren Buffett-backed BYD could flood their markets, undercutting domestic production and vehicle prices to the detriment of their own auto industries.

“The introduction of cheap Chinese autos — which are so inexpensive because they are backed with the power and funding of the Chinese government — to the American market could end up being an extinction-level event for the U.S. auto sector,” the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a U.S. manufacturing advocacy group, said in a report last month.

BYD sold 1.57 million battery EVs last year, up from just 130,970 all-electric vehicles in 2020. That sales growth was enough to surpass Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles in late 2023. 

The rise of BYD and other Chinese automakers led Tesla CEO Elon Musk in January to warn that Chinese automakers will “demolish” global rivals without trade barriers. ...

The company has quickly rolled out new and updated products. It’s also rapidly established manufacturing, as it has its eyes set on factories in Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia, Hungary, Uzbekistan and, potentially, Mexico. ...

Former President Donald Trump – the front-runner among Republicans in the 2024 presidential race – on Saturday suggested instituting a 100% tariff on cars made in Mexico by Chinese companies, should he be elected to a second term.

Indonesia is barely 31% fully vaxxed, yet daily new cases per million has returned to baseline anyway

 

My condolences to your theory, Eric Topol.

COVID-19 in the largest countries by population: Update for Sun 5/2/21

Countries with 200 million population or more: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria.

Data isn't available in all categories for all countries, and data quality varies dramatically.

One should assume figures in the Big Seven are more or less gross underestimations except in the USA. 

China in particular is a JOKE. Why anyone takes them seriously as a "global partner" is beyond me. Show me an honest communist and I will give you six free winning lotto numbers.

Hospital reporting is the worst. Very few countries report the data at all, which tells you they are neither motivated nor equipped to do so even though this is a pretty serious situation which is over one year old. Given how important that data is in judging the progress and severity of the pandemic, it is more than discouraging. The top five for hospitalizations are all US and Europe, the difference between true civilization and the rest being that we know the numbers at all.

The situations in Brazil and especially India are alarming given the high positivity rate in India and the high death rate in Brazil. Reports concentrating on India underreporting deaths (from Reuters and the like) in recent weeks are a sick joke compared with neighboring China which the charts say is a COVID utopia. India is a developing nation struggling to cope under an enormous strain while still remaining part of the free world, but journalists would rather criticize it than question China's glaring effrontery. The myopia is damning.

These Big Seven represent 4.065 billion of the world's population of 7.79 billion, 52.2%, and we don't have a clear picture of what's really going on with them.

What reason would there be to think positively?

Daily new cases, and deaths, per million in the US are still at last summer levels and have not made new lows. Same with hospitalizations. Case positivity is rising again and is actually at 5.8%, provisionally, in this data. Previous very recent levels in the 7s, however, have simply vanished from the record. Why? Johns Hopkins is currently showing 4%. What to believe?

Vaccinations still can't be pointed to for lowering the US numbers because the numbers remain too high. I'm sure they'll point to them once they decline as evidence for vaccine efficacy. Seasonality will be ignored. I will leave a vaccination horror story update for a separate, future post.

Why have cases and deaths and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed in the past in the absence of vaccines? I predict they'll never really say, same as we hear no good explanation for why H1N1 from 2009 simply dropped off the radar. Why did it go away despite the vaccine against it turning into a giant flop? 

They can't predict pandemics' comings and goings anymore than they can predict global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 2000s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the end of the Reagan Bull in 2000.

Man is a worm, according to the Bible, a poor player upon the stage, according to Shakespeare, an idiot whose tale is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing!

 

daily new cases per million

daily new deaths per million

case positivity rate

share of population vaccinated usa v world

Top five countries for C19 hospitalizations

share vaccinated in the largest countries by population

 

daily new deaths/million

daily new cases/million

The New Yorker ignores how wildfires contribute gargantuan quantities of emissions compared with power plants

A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change:

Compared with the Clean Power Plan, [the EPA's new Affordable Clean Energy rules] could, over the next few decades, allow hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon emissions.

Hundreds of millions of tons over decades, eh?

How about gigatons from wildfires in just one year?

Forest fires may produce as much CO2 as half of all fossil fuels burned:

In 1997, a fire consumed 8,000 square kilometers of mostly peatland in Borneo. Researchers estimated 0.2 Gt of carbon were released in this one area that year, and that carbon emissions from fires across Indonesia in 1997 emitted between 0.8 and 2.5 Gt — or “13 to 40%” of the size of global human fossil fuel emissions. ... 

Other researchers, der Werf et al 2004, looked at fires around the world during the El Nino year and estimated that 2.1 Gt of carbon was released — which explained 66% ± 24% of the extra CO2 emitted globally that year. Bowman et al estimate fires produced emissions around 50% of the size of human emissions. ...

California, Nevada and Colorado could impact climate far more deeply, cheaply and effectively RIGHT NOW by preventing and containing the wildfires which are making moot the comparatively puny plans of the EPA.

James Pethokoukis on China trade reminds me of my doctor pushing statin drugs

As everyone knows, statin drugs for cholesterol inhibit CoQ10 synthesis. So now the doctors push a CoQ10 supplement on you at the same time they push the cholesterol drug.

As George W. Bush famously said, "That doesn't make any sense."

So along comes James Pethokoukis confronted with the study showing how the opening to China trade destroyed many American jobs and lives.

His solution?

An expanded earned income credit, wage subsidies, and other government safety net initiatives to encourage work over retirement.

And relocation assistance to where the jobs are.

Never mind we don't want to move to China, India, Pakistan, Thailand or Indonesia.

Like Keynesians and MDs pushing drugs libertarians can never be proven wrong.

Just like Obama, Ted Cruz has been megalomaniacal from a young age

Video here:

“Well, other than that, take over the world, world domination, you know, rule everything,” the considerably skinnier Cruz said back then. “Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff.”

Both have been men in a hurry, using election to the Senate as a springboard to the presidency. That's called unseemly ambition, and Obama had it from the age of nine:

In A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, author Janny Scott tells how young Barack - then known by the westernised abbreviation of 'Barry' - was pushed by his mother to reach for the sky right from the start. ... His mother's ambition was clearly not lost on the future U.S. president. When his Indonesian stepfather asked him once what he wanted to be when he grew up, he was probably expecting him to say an airline pilot or an athlete. '"Oh, prime minister', Barry answered,' wrote Ms Scott.

Donald Trump was on to Cruz' character in December when he said:

"I don't think he's qualified to be president," Trump told host Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," adding: "Look at the way he's dealt with the Senate, where he goes in there like a — you know, frankly like a little bit of a maniac. You're never going to get things done that way."

Obama has had very few legislative achievements after seven years, hence the repeated recourse to executive action. Even Obamacare had to be shoved down our throats through legislative gymnastics and without a single Republican vote. It's how such ambition turns out.

Expect the same if Cruz somehow got elected.

Obama's Indonesian Nanny Was A Man Who Thought He Was A Woman

As reported here by ABC News:

And so it was, at a cocktail party in 1969, that she met Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, who had arrived in the country two years earlier after marrying her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro.

Dunham was so impressed by Evie's beef steak and fried rice that she offered her a job in the family home. It didn't take long before Evie also was 8-year-old Barry's caretaker, playing with him and bringing him to and from school.

Neighbors recalled that they often saw Evie leave the house in the evening fully made up and dressed in drag. But she says it's doubtful Barry ever knew.

"He was so young," says Evie. "And I never let him see me wearing women's clothes. But he did see me trying on his mother's lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up."

When the family left in the early 1970s, things started going downhill. She moved in with a boyfriend. 

Obama Admits It Again: He's Tempted By Tyranny, and Disrespects Limits

"The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform." (quoted here yesterday)

Here's The New York Times in March: Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China.

And, of course, at the age of nine being prime minister of Indonesia already looked pretty good, according to this in April: His mother's ambition was clearly not lost on the future US president. When his Indonesian stepfather asked him once what he wanted to be when he grew up, he was probably expecting him to say an airline pilot or an athlete. "'Oh, prime minister', Barry answered,'" wrote Ms Scott.

The hunger for power evidently began early. But its possession now apparently does not satisfy. What's especially disturbing is the frustration Obama keeps expressing with the limits we place on presidential power in America. He's frequently seen bowing to foreign leaders. Why not to the constitution?

Nothing in it prevented FDR from seeking a third term, and then a fourth, except respect for the long tradition of the unwritten rule of laying down power voluntarily after two terms, going back to the example of George Washington. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1951, was the people's response to the lack of self-control FDR showed by his actions.

Obama would do well to consider that more seriously, and these words from our Declaration of Independence:

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Obama in Indonesia Aged 9 Already Lusted for Power, Learned His 'Cool' from Discrimination

So claims a new book, reported about here.