The passing scene is hilarious, until it careens through the front yard and crashes into my living room.
Friday, March 25, 2022
Environmentalists sneered at Trump's promotion of natural gas, and Europe didn't want his Freedom Gas in 2019, now they're cutting deals for US LNG which Trump made the US the world's third top exporter of by 2019
EU strikes gas deal with the U.S. as it seeks to cut its reliance on Russia :
The White House said the EU said would work toward the goal of ensuring, until at least 2030, demand for approximately 50 billion cubic meters per year of extra U.S. LNG. This is “consistent with our shared net-zero goals,” it added.
U.S. liquefied natural gas export capacity will be world’s largest by end of 2022:
U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity has grown rapidly since the Lower 48 states first began exporting LNG in February 2016. In 2019, the United States became the world’s third-largest LNG exporter, behind Australia and Qatar. Once the new LNG liquefaction units, called trains, at Sabine Pass and Calcasieu Pass in Louisiana are placed in service by the end of 2022, the United States will have the world’s largest LNG export capacity.
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Look who's talkin', lady
Mocked Putin as 'small, pale and almost reptilian' in final scathing op-ed...
Even in death Madeleine Albright, who later in her life had said she was shocked to learn that she was Jewish, remains half-bright.
Failure by US health authorities to count COVID-19 cases in March 2022 is causing the case fatality rate to soar
Case fatality rates in the US
Stupid beyond a reasonable doubt
Seattle Times LOL on new DA Alvin Bragg who obviously developed reasonable doubt because his own prosecutors suddenly went for lesser charges:
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
AP Obama, lying sacks of shit: "As coronavirus cases plummeted around the United States this year ... after months of case declines ..."
The Wall Street Journal shapes the news to one end, AP Obama to another end.
All this in a story about oooooh, Biden press secretary gets COVID-19 for a second time.
She's double jabbed and boosted.
Meanwhile AP Obama is COMPLETELY IGNORING that January's cases set a pandemic record, after which Biden has given up on testing despite criticizing Trump for not testing enough.
Why? So he can put the pandemic behind us.
Biden sees the public has given up, and he's simply doing the same thing.
Meanwhile Omicron is running rampant out there, Biden has given up testing for it, and many vulnerable people will continue to die as a result.
No one gives a damn.
Biden press secretary has COVID-19, won’t travel to Europe
US COVID-19 deaths in the first 21 days of March: 1,101 per day
2021 average: 1,310 per day
First 80 days of 2022: 1,845 per day
LOL Wall Street Journal: "The S-300 from Belarus wasn’t among the systems that are being sent to Ukraine, one U.S. official said"
That right there is an unnamed US source quoted for plausible deniability, primarily for Russian consumption. The link is free to read at Drudge.
USA Sending Soviet Air Defense Systems...
The story is an example of US disinformation involving a shell game of transfers of maybe this, maybe that, maybe here, maybe there.
Happy to see it!
WASHINGTON—The U.S. is sending some of the Soviet-made air defense equipment it secretly acquired decades ago to bolster the Ukrainian military as it seeks to fend off Russian air and missile attacks, U.S. officials said. ... in 1994 ... a Soviet-made transport plane was observed at the Huntsville, Ala., airport within sight of a major highway. It was later disclosed that the plane was carrying an S-300 air defense system that the U.S. had acquired in Belarus ... The S-300—called the SA-10 by NATO—is a long-range, advanced air defense system intended to protect large areas over a much wider radius. ... At least some of what the U.S. sent was from that base, said officials, who added that C-17s recently flew to a nearby airfield at Huntsville. ... [SECDEF] Austin last week visited Slovakia to explore if the country would send an S-300 from its arsenal. Slovakia has said that it would do so if the U.S. would provide it with a replacement . . ..
Monday, March 21, 2022
The Spratly Islands are now teeming with Chinese offensive weapons
OVER THE SOUTH CHINA SEA (AP) — China has fully militarized at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea, arming them with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment, and fighter jets in an increasingly aggressive move that threatens all nations operating nearby, a top U.S. military commander said Sunday.
U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. John C. Aquilino said the hostile actions were in stark contrast to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s past assurances that Beijing would not transform the artificial islands in contested waters into military bases. The efforts were part of China’s flexing its military muscle, he said. ...
A U.N.-backed arbitration tribunal that handled the case invalidated China’s sweeping historical claims in the South China Sea under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Beijing dismissed the ruling as sham and continues to defy it.
Saturday, March 19, 2022
Besides Alexander Solzhenitsyn, lots of people in America and elsewhere have been very friendly with Vladimir Putin over the years
Things were different in 2007, and Solzhenitsyn would live only until the next year, but he did support Vladimir Putin at the time
https://archive.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/08/05/toward_end_solzhenitsyn_embraced_putins_russia/
Here's the lede:
MOSCOW - In the last years of his long and stubbornly contrarian life, Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally found a political system he could embrace: Vladimir Putin's Russia.
"Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people," Solzhenitsyn told Der Spiegel in a 2007 interview. "And he started to do what was possible, a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately."
51 former "intelligence" officials lied about Hunter Biden's laptop, and thousands of health "professionals" have been lying about the vaccines
Seems like kind of a pattern for the Trump-Russia-dossier-collusion crowd who all just happened to vote for Hillary, too.
Friday, March 18, 2022
WaPo is full of it, as usual: Zelensky isn't sending "mixed messages"
The mounting death toll in Ukraine has forced President Volodymyr Zelensky to consider concessions to Russia in order to bring an end to the devastating conflict, but the specific elements of any peace deal his government may be discussing with Moscow remain a mystery to Western leaders . . . said U.S. and European officials.
Thursday, March 17, 2022
It probably never occurred to Volodymyr Zelensky that the deaths of 100 Ukrainian children wouldn't mean much to a country which has aborted 63 million of its own babies since 1973
“Now I’m almost 45 years old. Today, my age stopped when the hearts of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths.”
Some of us have seen no sense in life, either, for a very long, long time.
LOL, US Senate votes "unanimously" for permanent daylight saving time, "probably the worst choice"
The bipartisan bill is the work of perhaps the two dumbest people in the US Senate, Patty Murray and Marco Rubio, who represent the extreme northwest, the extreme southeast, and the nation generally.
While no time system will be perfect for everyone, making daylight saving time permanent would lead to a greater number of dark mornings than we have now, said Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. ...
Experts say circadian misalignment has been associated with adverse effects on cognition and mood as well as cardiovascular and metabolic function. “It’s really not a good thing to have your internal body clocks out of sync,” Zee said. “Imagine being in jet lag a lot of the time; it can’t be good for you." ...
Zee said her “heart sank” when she saw the news of the Senate vote. “I thought there would be more of a discussion, that it wouldn’t be as unanimous.” Of the three potential time systems for the country to be on — permanent standard, biannual switching and permanent daylight saving time — she said, the last is “probably the worst choice.”
More.
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
The stock market didn't give a flying fig about the Fed's quarter-point interest rate increase today: Powell was way too timid, should have just gone with one full point
The insanity of easy money is liked most by the stock market, which is why Powell is going slow on his way to two percent after he completes the six more increases he's promising over the next year.
If he thinks the rate ought to be 2% to curb inflation, well then get on with it, boy, and show us what you've got! Nip it in the bud if it's that big a FD.
Truth is they've got nothing, and intend to do nothing about inflation.
Inflation this high needs a bigger gun than 2% one year down the road. That's not how it was done in the 1980s, and 2% even if done right now won't do a damn thing.
This is just inflation theatre, just like the TSA war on terror security theatre, the this government theatre, the that government theatre, and lately the vaccine theatre.
Meanwhile the first in line to all this easy money keep getting richer, and richer, and richer.
Gotta keep that going while appearing to DO SOMETHING!
What a crock.
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Hi, I'm president Joe Biden and the buck stops with COVID-19, Vladimir Putin, and high fuel costs, not with me
Joe just wants you to forget that his anti-fossil fuel policies pushed gasoline from $2.09 to $3.44 in one year from his election, that he did nothing to dampen the NATO connections with Ukraine which have inflamed Putin, and that he failed to shut down the virus.
He also omits that his ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan broadcast the very weakness which was later on display when he promised Putin that US and NATO troops would not get involved in Ukraine.
"Step right this way, Vladimir!"
LOL, as telegraphed on March 10th, Massachusetts subtracts 3,770 COVID deaths from total because they died of COVID longer than 30 days after infection
So, the real story is Massachusetts has changed its counting method TWICE to reduce an "overcount" mostly during the UK variant wave when most authorities increasingly look to excess death data and conclude that COVID death counts don't actually capture the true number of COVID deaths.
Massachusetts is completely counter trend.
Monday, March 14, 2022
Gold fanatics never mention the potentially bad tax news
The war in Ukraine has pushed more investors into gold, which some see as a “safe haven” in volatile times, and fueled a price rally. ...
Conversely, the capital-gains tax rate on collectibles aligns with these seven [ordinary income tax] rates, up to a 28% maximum. That means an investor whose annual income puts them in the 12% tax bracket would pay a 12% tax rate on their collectibles profits; an investor in the 37% bracket would be capped at 28% on their collectibles profits.
Hero Joe Manchin won't support Biden climate lunatic Sarah Bloom Raskin for Federal Reserve Board
This red diaper doper baby thinks it would be a good idea for banks to refuse to lend to the oil and gas industry in order to end it.
She's an Obama administration retread.
Sunday, March 13, 2022
Welcome to February 2022 CIVPART data at 62.3%, otherwise known as September 1977
The 2020 average was revised to 61.8 and the 2021 average is 61.7.
One way to grow the participation rate, as seen in the first chart, which is monthly, is TO NOT HAVE TO COUNT PEOPLE.
How do you do that?
The economy sucks so bad you drop out of the labor force, which instantly shrinks its size. So as jobs recover a little bit the participation rate looks better because more people compared with the smaller underlying base are working again.
Not in labor force on an average basis hit an all time high in 2021 of 100.24m, pushed mostly by the 2008 catastrophe for older workers, while growth in the labor force has been anemic to flat because people aren't having enough kids.
People who remember the malaise of the Jimmy Carter era who are still alive today can relate.
CIVPART hovering on the 63% line was the Trump era's "greatest economy ever", lol.
Click any graph to enlarge.