Peace talks in Pakistan have failed, Vance is on his way home

Here we go.

Tanker traffic out of the Persian Gulf has been cut by 98% in one month because of the Iran War, effectively reducing the world's primary energy inputs through the Strait of Hormuz by 20%

The UAE is bypassing the Strait of Hormuz with 1.9 million barrels per day now coming out of Fujairah via its overland pipeline, and Saudi Arabia's overland pipeline west to Yanbu is moving about 4.5 million barrels per day out through the Red Sea, but that's not the 20 million barrels per day lost due to the war, and no LNG is moving at all.

Pakistan and Bangladesh get two thirds of their LNG from the Gulf, Taiwan gets one third of its LNG. Taiwan says its has eleven days' supply remaining. Many others are also severely affected by the cut-off of LNG from Qatar. About 20 LNG tankers are trapped in the Gulf, half the global fleet available for charter.

Meanwhile Iran has increased export of its oil from 1 million barrels per day in February to 2 million in March, 90% of which goes to China, and Iran is now charging tolls to vessels to exit the Gulf along its coast, which occurs only under Iranian escort. 

 

 

Trump outmanuevered: Iran decision to let vessels from non-hostile nations through the Strait of Hormuz will make any U.S. military action interfering with that to blame for disruptions

 Oil prices fall as Iran signals safe passage for ‘non-hostile’ ships through Strait of Hormuz

... Iran’s mission to the United Nations said Tuesday that “non-hostile vessels” would be able to pass through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, provided they coordinate “with the competent Iranian authorities.”

The social media post appears to establish a protocol that has emerged in recent days, with some ships from China, India and Pakistan able to pass through the waterway as Iran flexes control over it. ...

Pakistan retaliates against Iran with military aircraft, attacks elements of the Balochistan Liberation Front just across the border, kills several

Pakistan Foreign Ministry:

 “Pakistan fully respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran".

More.

Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Erbil, Iraq and Balochistan Province in Pakistan, a nuclear power, show the Biden administration's policy of appeasement is an abject failure

 Biden's weakness has emboldened Iran, which is betting that the superpower which cut and run in Afghanistan has no stomach to stop the aggression of the religious dictatorship in Tehran.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Within 24 hours, Iran launched missile and drone strikes on targets in three countries — Iraq, Syria and Pakistan — and took the extraordinary step of announcing its responsibility for the attacks, triggering anger from its neighbors. ... Baghdad recalled its ambassador to Iran after the Monday night attack ...

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that it “strongly condemns the unprovoked violation of its airspace by Iran” which it said killed two children and injured three more. It added that “it is even more concerning that this illegal act has taken place despite the existence of several channels of communication between Pakistan and Iran.”

More. 

Pakistan is believed to possess over 100 operational nuclear warheads which can be delivered from a number of different platforms. 

Would Iran attack Pakistan like this without having the same capability, or are they just fools?

Oops, so sorry ve bombed you, dat vas a mishtake, nevermind

India says it accidentally fired missile into Pakistan

 

Taliban blunders story by NBC is complete rubbish designed to absolve the Taliban: What the Taliban did was intentional and precisely gives them the cover these naive reporters bought hook, line and sinker

In their push to retake Afghanistan, the Taliban made the security situation much more precarious by breaking prisoners out of prisons — including hardcore fighters housed at Bagram Air Base, Taliban officials acknowledged to NBC News.

Two Taliban leaders said in an interview that their biggest blunder was “releasing thousands of prisoners, among them hardcore Islamic State commanders, master trainers and bomb-makers. They were very trained people, and they are now organizing themselves.”

The Taliban itself was never designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, but the Haqqani network, which has close ties to Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence, has long held that distinction.

More. 

The idea that the Taliban is not a terror organization is a lie, a fiction maintained by our lunatic US State Department and its friends in the press.

White House: Yes, The Taliban Is a Terrorist Organization   

GOP accuse Obama of "negotiating with terrorists," WH says Bergdahl was POW.

By JOHN PARKINSON and LEE FERRAN

June 4, 2014, 6:19 PM

But Tuesday White House National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden noted that the Taliban was added to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) by executive order in July 2002, even if it is not listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department. Either designation triggers asset freezes, according to the State Department, though they can differ on other restrictions imposed on the target organization. The Treasury Department told ABC News the Taliban is still on their SDGT list.

Afghanistan is folding like a house of cards

Last week, the Taliban said they now control 85% of Afghanistan’s territory — a claim that is impossible to verify but that was considerably higher than previous Taliban statements that more than a third of the country’s 421 districts and district centers were in their control.

More.

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

Update for COVID-19 English-speaking world case fatality rates as of 1/19/21

 Per Johns Hopkins University (data changes slightly as we write):

Global totals:

deaths 2,044,445 / cases 95,703,104

Case fatality rate 2.13%

G-7 nations Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US, plus Australia and New Zealand:

deaths 713,992 / cases 36,041,142

Case fatality rate 1.98%

Rest of the world 2.23% 

Ten other nations with the largest English-speaking populations (India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Russia, Thailand, South Africa / data quality obviously varies):

deaths 295,121 / cases 17,399,153 

Case fatality rate 1.69% 

South Korea, not shown above, is a good example of how no matter what nations seem to do to stop the spread of the disease, case fatality rates everywhere seem to be ending up in the vicinity of 2%.

Early on South Korea was impressing with a rate well below 1%, but today it is at 1.75%. Japan is up to 1.33%. Much vaunted New Zealand is up to 1.10%.

Compared with Canada 2.51%, France 2.38%, Germany 2.32%, Italy 3.45%, the UK 2.61%, and Australia 3.16%, the good ole USA 1.657% is doing much better than the hysterical headlines would have you believe.

That said, in the US COVID-19 is still sixteen and half times more deadly than influenza. This is a serious crisis, the long term health effects of which are not known.

A recent long term study from May to November in the US showed an alarming rise in hospitalizations for COVID among children. Another study from the UK indicated an alarming rise in the death rate for individuals six months after recovering from COVID. The impact of the disease on the human vascular system is typically acute in the lungs, but remains a still not well understood threat to the rest of the body and its organs.

You don't want to get it. 24 million in the US already have, just 7% of the population.  

Border Patrol in Rio Grande Valley has apprehended illegals from 44 countries, on track for 60, not like before when it was the same people over and over again

Border Patrol: 25,000 Illegal Aliens Evaded Capture in Southeast Texas:

"So far, here in south Texas, we’ve apprehended folks from 44 different countries. These are from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, you name it.” Although most illegal aliens hail from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, Ortiz estimates that by the end of the year, Border Patrol will have apprehended people from 60 different countries. ... Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said that although Border Patrol apprehended more than 1 million people in the early- to mid-2000s, it was often the same people, from Mexico, and it was easy to return them. ... “But now, that’s not what we’re dealing with. We’re on pace to have about 900,000 arrests, but that’s 900,000 people that we’re dealing with. Whereas back in the early-2000s, we were dealing with somewhere around 500,000, 600,000 people. We were just arresting the same person over and over and over again. So we’re dealing with something that’s just never been dealt with before. And if we don’t get the support from Congress, we’re going to fail. Period.”

Ten shit-hole rivers in Asia and Africa responsible for 90% of plastic polluting the world's oceans

 Seven of the ten are communist with Chinese characteristics:

Yangtze River, China (1.5 million tonnes annually and worst offender)

Hai he River, China 

Yellow River, China 

Mekong River, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam

Pearl River, China and Vietnam

Indus River, China, India and Pakistan 

Ganges River, India and Bangladesh

Amur River, Russia and China 

Nile River, eleven countries including Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya

Niger River, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Benin and Nigeria 

Just 10 rivers carry 90% of plastic polluting the oceans

 

BBC calls convicted, mostly Pakistani, grooming gang 'Oxford Men', which ought to outrage the elite university's graduates everywhere

Trump makes a dumb purchase, and they're more than happy to sell it to him

Trump takes ownership of Afghanistan War

After speech, Afghanistan is Trump's war now

Pah-key-stahn

Talks like a Pakistani-an.

Gay Pakistani Indian subject of the Queen gets his green card, tells the story of what's wrong with our immigration policy

In a word, it's too thin.

Ask yourself if this guy would be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for Donald Trump, Bob Dole, or your mother, and then tell me that your answer means the future is safe.

Here in The Wall Street Journal, the perfect place for the libertarian citizen of the world to tell his story:

What America offered [Nabokov], as it now offers me, was the opportunity to slough off the demands of the past. As a college student at Amherst, I had been unnerved by this aspect of the U.S. I thought my sense of self depended too much on the knots of intractable history that were integral to identity in the old world. I was afraid that identity in America would feel too thin, too much a thing of ink and paper.

What I had not counted on was what a relief that could be. Fifteen years later, it was what I had come back for. It was an immense freedom. No cultural attachment, no matter how great, can compete with it. The relief of being free of the past, and safe in the future . . ..

We're old right, not alt-right, in case you were wondering, because we have faith in God and fear him and they don't

And they will end badly, if they can even manage to end at all.

Alt-righter John Derbyshire, formerly welcome at National Review where he was a better and even somewhat beloved writer, explains the difference here: 

"As has often been noted, state ideologies, like the Cultural Marxism that currently holds sway in the West, key to the same social and psychological receptors as religions. Recall the late Larry Auster’s observation that blacks are sacred objects, criticism of which is received just as blasphemy used to be in the Age of Faith, and still is in places like Pakistan.

"Alt-Right types — all of them, though in many different ways — are reacting against this state ideology.

"What characterizes the Alt-Right is the rejection of Cultural Marxism; but while it characterizes us, it doesn’t unify us. That’s because we haven’t fled from the CultMarx pseudo-religion to some other, unifying faith. We don’t do faith." 

Substituting the truth with a lie doesn't make the truth a lie.

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.

Tashfeen Malik, like lying American liberals, lied about the smallest detail, her home address

notice the poorly plucked eyebrows

Reported here:

'Malik came to the U.S. on what is known as a “fiancé” visa, which allows an American fiancé to petition for his or her partner’s temporary entry before marriage. For the visa application, the address she listed in her Pakistani hometown, ABC News discovered today, does not exist. Malik received a [sic] her Green Card this summer, U.S. officials said.'

Ann Sterzinger on sex-obsessed Islam

Here:

"[A]mong religions in modern vogue, none is more explosively kinky than Islam."

It's true, Islam is sex-obsessed:

"[T]he world’s top porn consumers come out of the Middle East. According to data released by Google, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. Pakistan tops the list at number one, followed by Egypt at number two. Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey come in at numbers four, five, seven and eight, respectively. Pakistan leads the way in porn searches for animals like pigs, donkeys, dogs, cats and snakes."