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:

 

 

Record 549 cases of dengue fever in Puerto Rico

 Story here.

There have been nearly 25,000 cases so far this year in Peru, double the 2023 year to date figure.

Elon Musk expresses uncommon good sense about Donald Trump

Writing on Twitter, where Musk has more than 100 million followers, the celebrity CEO said: “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset. Dems should also call off the attack – don’t make it so that Trump’s only way to survive is to regain the Presidency.”

CNBC, here. 

 

Rod Dreher goes hunting a confederacy of dunces, bags prey from The Week, National Review, Religion News Service, The New Republic, Reason, NYMag, and Vox

 

Bloomberg economic model forecasts 25% tariffs between democratic and autocratic countries would roll back globalization to 1990s levels and leave the world 3.5% poorer

Arguably that would be a good thing for American workers, but Bloomberg doesn't care about that.

 

For three decades, a defining feature of the world economy has been its ability to churn out ever more goods at ever lower prices. The entry of more than a billion workers from China and the former Soviet bloc into the global labor market, coupled with falling trade barriers and hyper-efficient logistics, produced an age of abundance for many.But the last four years have brought an escalating series of disruptions. Tariffs multiplied during the US-China trade war. The pandemic brought lockdowns. And now, sanctions and export controls are upending the supply of commodities and goods.All of this risks leaving advanced economies facing a problem they thought they’d vanquished long ago: that of scarcity. Emerging nations could see more acute threats to energy and food security, like the ones already causing turmoil in countries from Sri Lanka to Peru. And everyone will have to grapple with higher prices.

More.

The story never mentions how those newly introduced extra billion plus workers reduced economic outcomes for the already established middle classes around the world, especially in America where the full time job of the 1990s became a thing of the past.

If I'm repeating myself, I don't care.

 

 

 

Alex Berenson still thinks The Atlantic was wrong about Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice

You can still read Alex Berenson, at Substack, as I do. He continues to be an important source for stories our media continues to ignore (censor) because they don't fit the narrative. But sometimes the takes can be odd.

Alex today still thinks the Georgia story way back when was a bad covid take, and that Germany's troubles presently somehow invalidate The Atlantic's positive opinion on the record of Europe's biggest country outside of Russia.

Neither point is defensible.

The US State of Georgia today ranks 10th worst in the US for deaths per million of its population, at 2961/m. Mississippi is our very worst, at 3511/m. In between there, there are red and blue states, including New Jersey and New York.

But Germany today is at 1361/m. Worst place in the world Peru by contrast is at 6336/m.

Germany's done pretty damn well considering it has a population of 83 million compared with Georgia's paltry <10 million.

The situation in Georgia to date, in fact, is 118% worse than in Germany. And if Georgia were a country, it would be ranked in the top 15 worst performers in the world today for deaths per million.

I think Alex is letting animus cloud his judgment. Animus certainly for The Atlantic, but perhaps also for Germany.

Gee, why would that be?

Georgia's done a very poor job. Not as poor as New Jersey and New York, and not poor enough by comparison with them to be singled out the way they were. "Stupid hicks" elitism, right? On that we agree. But Germany's done remarkably well, and we should care enough to understand why.

But Alex is too busy to go into that right now. The drive-by-shooting of the "little homily on the brilliance of Germany’s Covid response" will have to do for now.

World Health Organization protects Xi Jinping's feelings, adopts Omicron for new South African variant B.1.1.529 instead of Nu or Xi

alpha beta gamma delta epsilon

zeta eta theta

iota kappa lambda mu nu

xi omicron pi 

rho sigma tau upsilon

phi chi psi omega

 

This is the first thing you learn in Greek 101, the alphabet. You've got it down when you can say it from memory after lighting a match and you don't burn your fingers, which you will need to write all the funny letters.

Looks like WHO needs to retake the course, however.

This new South African variant, B.1.1.529, will be very confusing since almost a year ago there was a South African variant everyone got hysterical about but it didn't take over the world. The India variant did instead.

That South African variant (B.1.351), was beta, retroactively so designated at the end of May 2021 with all the variants, which is probably why no one remembers it.

The UK variant (B.1.1.7), dominant in the US in April, May, and June, is alpha. 

The gamma variant (P.1), from Brazil, never amounted to much in the US, though that was fear-mongered, too.

The India variant (B.1.617.2) is delta, dominant in the US from July 1.

Epsilon covers variants from California, B.1.427/B.1.429.

Zeta is another Brazilian one, P.2.

Eta and iota cover variants from New York, B.1.526/B.1.525.

Theta was first detected in the Philippines, P.3.

Kappa's another one from India, B.1.617.1, as is B.1.617.3, which oddly hasn't its own Greek letter designation even though it's on radars.

Lambda is from Peru, C. 37.

Mu variants come from Colombia, B.1.621/B.1.621.1.

Nu and Xi are being skipped:

The WHO made the announcement about the B.1.1.529 variant out of Johannesburg, South Africa, passing over a letter many observers presumed would be next — “Nu” — as well as the subsequent letter, “Xi,” which composes part of Chinese leader Xi Jinping‘s name.

I'm looking forward to Beijing being called Peking again one day. 

I mean, who orders "Beijing Duck"?

At any rate, the reality, as one wag put it,  is that they are all Xi variants.

 

And as another answered, the final variant will be communism. 

 

MacArthur was right about China:

Here in Asia is where the communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest. 

 

Elites today everywhere are on their side.

 

 

Coronavirus deaths in Africa's "ivermectin" states are a fraction of what they are in their counterpart countries Brazil, Peru, and Spain

Brazil: 3.3m sq mi; population 213m

Nigeria: 357k sq mi; population 211m; deaths 0.42% of Brazil's

 

Peru: 496k sq mi; population 33m

Angola: 481k sq mi; population 32m; deaths 0.45% of Peru's

 

Spain: 195k sq mi; population 47m

Kenya: 224k sq mi; population 48m: deaths 4.3% of Spain's

 

Nigeria, Kenya and Angola, all of which have widely used ivermectin for years against parasitical disease, all have enviable COVID records compared with their similarly sized counterparts Brazil, Spain and Peru

 

 

The constant drumbeat in the US is how coronavirus hurts people of color proportionally more than it does whites, when these African countries which widely prescribe ivermectin have done astoundingly better than their counterpart countries by population in the West, as shown in these case graphs. And Nigeria has the added disadvantage of the three comparisons of being far more densely populated than Brazil but Brazil is 2nd worst in the world for COVID deaths.

Deaths

Brazil v Nigeria: 295k v 2k

Spain v Kenya: 74k v 2k

Peru v Angola: 50k v 0.5k

Elizabeth Talking Bull takes private DNA test to prove she's "Native American"

Well, she obviously took the private test and hired Bustamante because the tests you and I take wouldn't show what she needed to show. 

The Boston Globe reports here:

The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren’s critics. If her great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, that puts her at 1/32nd American Indian. But the report includes the possibility that she’s just 1/512th Native American if the ancestor is 10 generations back. ...

Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases. ...

To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That’s because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Straight about 12,000 years ago and settled in what’s now America but also migrated further south. His report explained that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed “for maximal accuracy.” ...

Ivy League universities, like the ones where Warren taught, were under great pressure to show they had diverse staffs.

The University of Pennsylvania filled out a document explaining why it hired a white woman over minority candidates — clear evidence it didn’t view her as a Native American addition. And the Globe interviewed 31 Harvard Law School faculty members who voted on her appointment there, and all said her heritage was not a factor. 

Update: The Boston Globe has amended the first paragraph above as follows:

The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren’s critics. If O.C. Sarah Smith were fully Native American, that would make Warren up to 1/32nd native. But the generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. The report notes there could be missed ancestors. 

In other words, Elizabeth Talking Bull could have far less "American Indian" blood in her than originally reported.

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.

The NY Times couldn't help itself and cut away to one last Obama speech before he got on the plane

For eight years "He talked, talked, talked too much, he talked too much" to paraphrase the song.

And did nothing.

The irony: The Arab street views the Christian West as as anti-capitalist as itself

From Hernando de Soto, here:

For the poor in many Arab states, it can take years to do something as simple as validating a title to real estate. At a recent conference in Tunisia, I told leaders, “You don’t have the legal infrastructure for poor people to come into the system.” “You don’t need to tell us this,” said one businessman. “We’ve always been for entrepreneurs. Your prophet chased the merchants from the temple. Our prophet was a merchant!” ...

All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction.

As countries from China to Peru to Botswana have proved in recent years, poor people can adapt quickly when given a framework of modern rules for property and capital. The trick is to start. We must remember that, throughout history, capitalism has been created by those who were once poor.

America Punished With A Baby