US COVID-19 deaths in the first 8 days of March average 1,479 per day, 13% higher than the 1,310 per day average rate for all of 2021.
136,351 have died since December 31st, or 2,035 per day, 55% higher than the 2021 average rate.
No one cares anymore, on either side of the politics.
Where's the paxlovid, approved for emergency use on December 22nd?
From the story:
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks . . .
Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.
Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915. ...
The hunt for the wreck, which cost more than $10 million, provided by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, was conducted from a South African icebreaker that left Cape Town in early February. ...
Once the wreck was located several days ago . . ..
Shackleton was tripped up by the Weddell’s notoriously thick, long-lasting sea ice, which results from a circular current that keeps much ice within it. In early January 1915 Endurance became stuck less than 100 miles from its destination and drifted with the ice for more than 10 months as the ice slowly crushed it. ...
The Weddell Sea still remains far icier than other Antarctic waters . . ..
The icebreaker, Agulhas II, left the search area on Tuesday [yesterday, March 8] for the 11-day voyage back to Cape Town.
More.
Why do you think it's taken this long to find the wreck?
Conditions there are as inhospitable now as they have ever been, and are forbidding even to a $10 million expedition using a modern icebreaker and fancy undersea gear with sonar and high resolution cameras and a short window of opportunity of only "several days" to spend documenting the find once they'd found it before having to high tail it out of there.
From departure from Cape Town Saturday February 5 to departure from the Weddell Sea Tuesday March 8 was thirty-one days.
That's the news that's not mentioned by The New York Times, even while mentioning it.
Endurance's coal-fired steam engine could make 10 knots
Defense One, here.
The official outlined a scenario in which Putin consolidates some gains in southern Ukraine but fails to install a new puppet regime.
“Ukrainians may or may not cease and desist. The West may or may not continue to arm the Ukrainian insurgency and [Putin] might decide, ‘OK. I'm going to set off a bomb somewhere in western Ukraine to send a message that I have crossed the nuclear threshold, and you can follow me if you want.”
Remember when the British were famous for the phrase, "steady on"?
Or "steady as she goes"?
Yeah, me neither.
Latvia yesterday:
In a press conference Monday, Rinkevics said that public opinion and policymakers’ decision-making had shifted with regards to military deployments, noting that now “we need a permanent stationing of NATO troops, including U.S. troops, on our soil” — something he had called for before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the day Russia invaded Ukraine (Feb. 24), Biden ordered the
deployment of an additional 7,000 U.S. troops to Europe, and moved
forces already in Europe to NATO’s eastern flank, including to Latvia. ...
Even though the Baltic states have been a part of NATO and the EU since 2004, with all three using the euro as their currency, their geographic location makes them vulnerable. Like Ukraine, they all share a border with Russia. Latvia and Lithuania also share a border with Russia’s ally Belarus, which is widely believed to be supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
More.
Buchanan with Hannity and Colmes, November 26, 2007, Putin's seventh year in office:
COLMES: You want — yes, you want us to get out of Russia, too. You want us to pull the troops back, get the troops out of all — wherever we have United States troops.
BUCHANAN: Look, the Russians got up and walked out of Eastern Europe. They moved their army behind the Urals. They let Eastern Europe go free. They let 15 nations break up. What did we move NATO into their face for?
More.
1,465 per day.
Normal per day for influenza: 98.
CNBC here:
Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have appeared to back away from a coordinated Western embargo on Russian energy exports, however. ...
Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion have so far
been carefully constructed to avoid directly hitting the country’s
energy exports, although there are already signs the measures are
inadvertently prompting banks and traders to shun Russian crude. ...
“You can’t simply close down use of oil and gas overnight, even from
Russia. That’s obviously not something that every country around the
world can do,” Johnson said. ...
Last time I checked the Ukrainians haven't targeted any high rise apartment buildings in Moscow for missile attacks like the Russians have in Ukraine.
In "What is Russia to Us?" here Codevilla vainly imagined Russia to be self-limited by the sobering lessons it has learned from its history:
Today, [John Quincy Adams] would be confident that Russia realizes it cannot control
Ukraine except for its Russian part, or the Baltics, never mind the
states of Eastern Europe. ...
Adams would not hide the fact that U.S. policy, implemented by ordinary diplomacy, is to foster the Baltic States’, and especially Ukraine’s, independence. But he would know and sincerely convey to Russia that their independence depends on themselves, and that he regards it as counterproductive to try making them into American pawns or even to give the impression that they may be. He would trust in a Ukraine that had stopped longing for the borders that Stalin had fixed for it in 1927 and Khrushchev augmented in 1954, in a Ukraine retrenching into its Western identity (as, for example, by asserting its Orthodox church’s independence from Russia’s), and that is standing firmly on its own feet. He would trust in Russia’s actual acceptance of its inability ever again to control this Ukraine. This would be Adams’s Ukraine policy.
https://in-cyprus.philenews.com/cyprus-forbids-mooring-of-five-russian-navy-ships-this-week-due-to-ukraine-war/ :
Even though Russia has signed an agreement with Cyprus to give its navy ships access to the Mediterranean country’s ports Nicosia this week forbade five of them from mooring because of the Ukrainian invasion. ... the agreement on the provision of facilities and a mooring permit is suspended.
Rod Dreher retweets a whiny guy with kids who thinks boomers are dogshit, a Canadian who is intimidated by a Russian circus act training with a bear, and a Russian propaganda map of Ukraine showing "the advance of our troops".
All in the last 24 hours.
He's in Spain and Hungary enjoying the cafe life for Lent.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
74% want a no fly zone!
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-americans-broadly-support-ukraine-no-fly-zone-russia-oil-ban-poll-2022-03-04/
But fewer than half want the broader war that implies.
It's always better to rely on yourself. The government will screw up a 2-car funeral.
Q:
"If a wider war breaks out in Europe, should the U.S. military be involved?"
A:
Here:
“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians. ... You are out there stroking your d---- over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot,” Lightfoot said, according to the complaint. “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago.”
The whole point of forcing Trump to accept bollard fencing was to make him a failure on his signature issue. Everyone already knew it was inadequate from the time of Bush, who agreed to it BECAUSE he knew it wouldn't work. Bush WANTED a porous border. Bollard fencing to Bush was like running on a pro-life plank and never having to do anything about it once in office. Good politics, that's all. Good optics.
Trump was set up to fail, and like a fool, he accepted it. That's the real story.
It was Republican payback for all the mean things Trump said about Republicans in 2015-2016. "We'll fix you, buster. Here's your fucking wall."
These facts are why WaPo has to write an article about the failure of bollard fencing periodically, in order to keep the lie alive that a border wall doesn't work. Their agenda is the same as the Republican Democrat agenda of a porous border, to keep the cheap labor flowing in, and the drugs. It's also Drudge's agenda.
Those two things are the most important to a sick, dying society, otherwise we'd have fixed this long ago.
And obviously, Trump is part of the problem, not the solution.
Now the stink on the border wall is so bad no one will come near it for a generation.
Mission accomplished.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-border-wall-has-been-breached-more-than-3000-times-by-smugglers-cbp-records-show/ar-AAUwpuh
The guy killed himself.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/man-who-pleaded-guilty-to-entering-capitol-on-jan-6-dies-by-suicide
Graves put away Jesse Jackson Jr for 2+ years and his wife for 1 year for crimes he called "staggering".
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/ex-fraud-prosecutor-nominated-to-be-the-u-s-attorney-in-d-c
Fiona Hill at Politico https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
and Amy Knight at The Daily Beast https://news.yahoo.com/russian-people-may-starting-think-092222195.html .
Fiona Hill can't make up her mind: "Putin is increasingly operating emotionally" but "there's been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way". Then she takes it all back at the end and says Putin didn't "initially set off to do all of this" despite the plan that goes back a very long way but his "feelings of loss, they've all been there" since the dissolution of the USSR, so he is operating emotionally.
Got it?
Amy Knight is similarly confused: "Hitler and Stalin were crazy by any psychiatric standard" but "Khrushchev—though volatile and impulsive—was apparently a rational actor, not consumed by the historical grudges and the need to show off his masculine credentials that seem to obsess Putin." Except dictators are all alike: "First of all, like any dictator, Putin does not feel confident of his hold on power".
Meanwhile the Russian people are just mind-numbed robots according to Amy, but they are our only hope: "Russians are conditioned to say they approve of their leader when there is no alternative" you see, but "hopefully, Russians themselves will take action and stop their leader".
And to underscore Amy's illogic, even though she references Putin's insane nuclear threat involving "consequences we have never seen in our entire history" which were made as the invasion began, somehow it was the subsequent "Ukrainian resistance stronger than expected" and crippling "Western sanctions" which are "probably why Putin resorted to the insanity of his nuclear threat".
"She's just pulling it out of her ass". -- Sigmund Freud
West Texas Intermediate Crude is at nosebleed level once again, no doubt about it.
Here it is almost 5 PM and he's repeating the falsehood that Russia killed all the Snake Island defenders, in order to whip up the indignation against Russia among his listeners.
The story was debunked many many hours ago.
I turn on the radio for five minutes and all I hear is lies.
We report, you decide.
Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions. Continue to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not part of your household. ...
Many people may already feel fear and anxiety about the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). The threat of a nuclear explosion can add additional stress.
Last Updated: 02/25/2022
Obama 2016 swan song:
$1.7-billion payment to Iran was all in cash due to effectiveness of sanctions, White House says
Germany will find a way to pay for heat, too. Keep a sharp eye out for flights from Frankfurt to Moscow, loaded with pallets of cash to get around SWIFT.
WASHINGTON —The United States, European allies and Canada agreed Saturday to remove key Russian banks from the interbank messaging system, SWIFT, an extraordinary step that will sever the country from much of the global financial system.
“This will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally,” the global powers wrote in a joint statement announcing the significant retaliatory measure.
Moscow’s exclusion from SWIFT, which stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, means Russian banks cannot communicate securely with banks beyond its borders. Iran was removed from SWIFT in 2014 following developments to Tehran’s nuclear program.
SWIFT is an independent enterprise based in Belgium that serves as an internal messaging system between more than 11,000 banks and financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories.
Europe is finally uniting against Putin on the third day of the Ukraine invasion, passing restrictions and sending arms and support, and Trump is calling Putin's machinations to invade Ukraine "smart", "genius", "very savvy", and "pretty savvy".
He's clueless. Putin has clearly over-reached and is leading Russia into permanent pariah status on the world stage.
I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.
So, Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.
By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, “I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,” he used the word “independent,” “and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.
More.
Republicans will pay a heavy price for backing this lunatic again.
As if the two things can't possibly both be true, that our borders should be under control and Russian aggression in Europe must be opposed.
And as usual Biden is a follower, not a leader, still mulling over what he should do.
Austria, Hungary, France, Italy, Cyprus all have now signaled readiness to accept the draconian measure in order to cut off Russia's access to payment flows.
Germany could easily find itself without heat very shortly if it relents.
Meanwhile Ukrainians are bravely fighting off the Russians alone.
... in 2010, when Germany was generating more than 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, Chancellor Angela Merkel extended the phaseout schedule to the mid-2030s. As other politicians had promised in the past, the extension was framed as a “bridge” to help the nation generate cost-effective power until renewables could take over.
But just a few months later, the Fukushima disaster struck. Germany’s anti-nuclear movement had already been enraged by the phaseout delay; the disaster only fueled their opposition. Germany swiftly closed most of its nuclear reactors and reestablished 2022 as the deadline for the phaseout — called the atomausstieg.
More.
The green ideology in Germany must go, just as Merkel has.
