Showing posts with label Panama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Panama. Show all posts

Friday, May 23, 2025

If ivermectin ever made a difference to COVID-19 outcomes in Africa, it sure didn't in Latin and South America

Wide distribution of ivermectin in Africa to combat river blindness does not appear to have had anything to do whatsoever with low death rates from COVID-19 in places like Angola (62 deaths per million of population), Kenya (120), and Nigeria (16).

It turns out that ivermectin was widely distributed in eight Latin and South American countries from June, August, and December 2020, but all of them had steeply higher death rates from the disease:

Peru 6,945
Brazil 3,396
Mexico 2,654
Panama 2,089
Bolivia 1,974
Guatemala 1,222
Honduras 1,165
El Salvador 652.
 
Exposure to fresh air and full spectrum sunlight with its infrared and ultraviolet radiation has been shown to speed recovery from the disease:
 

 

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Clueless Ed Kilgore today post-mid-March thinks angry Democrats are in the minority based on a Gallup poll from late January

But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.

Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.

Republicans are angry, too.

Has Ed been living under a rock?

Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":

... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in. 

The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.

I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.

The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.

No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.

Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.

And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.

461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.

Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.

People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.

Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.

American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.

Who knows what's next?

Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.


 

Monday, February 3, 2025

Trump will crow that Panama has bowed the knee by agreeing not to renew participation in China's Belt and Road Initiative, but Panama was already dissatisfied with China from 2019

 

Events quickly shifted, however, following the election of Laurentino Cortizo as Panama’s president in early 2019. After taking office, Cortizo suspended or cancelled multiple Chinese investment projects. A review by the Panama Maritime Authority (PMA), the government agency that oversees the country’s ports, of the PCCP concession found that the Landbridge-led consortium had failed to comply with numerous contractual terms, including investing only roughly one-fifth of the promised amount, failing to provide key project documentation, and employing much less local labor than promised. The review led to the PMA’s decision to revoke the PCCP concession in June 2021.

More here

Panama pledges to end key canal deal with China, work with US after Rubio visit

... José Raúl Mulino, Panama's president, said his nation's sovereignty over the 51-mile waterway, which connects the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, will remain unchanged. But he said he would not renew a 2017 memorandum of understanding to join China’s Belt and Road global development initiative and that Panama would instead look to work more closely with the U.S. ...

Sunday, May 2, 2021

Cool visuals of SpaceX Dragon nighttime splashdown 11:56pm off Panama City, Florida Saturday, May 1, 2021

Time from undock from ISS to splashdown was fewer than seven hours.

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Thursday, October 11, 2018

How bad was Hurricane Michael?

The Panama City Beach, FL, Waffle House was closed.

Story here.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Ehhhh ... puto! In the race for most fines for anti-gay slurs, Hispanic soccer fans have everyone else beat

Well, Spain was ruled by Muslims from 711 to 1492 AD.

From the story here:

Homophobia and homophobic chants are not exclusive to Mexico fans. Fifa issued 51 disciplinary actions over homophobia during 2018 World Cup qualifiers. Of these, 11 were handed to the Mexican federation, with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama and Peru also receiving multiple fines. Fifa additionally cited Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Greece, Hungary and Serbia once each for homophobic chants.

But there is no doubt the chant is most prominent among Mexico fans. “To call your opponent homosexual is definitely along a spectrum of machismo, whereby your opponent is weaker – less masculine,” says Joshua Nadel, author of Fútbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Giant Snake Fossil Proves Temps 10 Degrees Hotter Than Today AFTER Dinosaur Extinction

The snake has been dubbed "Titanoboa" in the story here:

Partial skeletons of a new giant, boa constrictor-like snake named “Titanoboa” found in Colombia by an international team of scientists and now at the University of Florida are estimated to be 42 to 45 feet long, the length of the T-Rex “Sue” displayed at Chicago’s Field Museum, said Jonathan Bloch, a UF vertebrate paleontologist who co-led the expedition with Carlos Jaramillo, a paleobotanist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. ...


Based on the snake’s size, the team was able to calculate that the mean annual temperature at equatorial South America 60 million years ago would have been about 91 degrees Fahrenheit, about 10 degrees warmer than today, Bloch said.

No word on what evil fossil fuel was responsible for the global warming.

The Washington Post story here cuts off the story, leaving out the  part about temperature: "It would have to have been so warm . . .."

So warm what?

Gee, I wonder why they cut him off?