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April 30, 2020
Blog Outage
Today the Typepad system Moon of Alabama and many other blogs are running on, had a lengthy outage. I have not heard yet what went wrong. The website seems to be back but the administrative side continues to be incredibly slow and tends to disconnect me every few minutes. For now I'll call it a day and hope that everything will be fine by tomorrow.
April 29, 2020
Some Covid-19 Links
Medical doctors are not well trained in statistics. When personal financial interest are involved they ignore even its most basic rules. California doctors with dubious COVID conclusions debunked – Pasadena Star Experts demolish studies suggesting COVID-19 is no worse than flu – Ars Technica This is somewhat similar to the calculation I made here: Antibody tests support what’s been obvious: Covid-19 is much more lethal than the flu – Washington Post A really good piece for debunking the various Coronavirus conspiracy claims: Bill de Blasio Has Had It With Hasidic Jews – Occidental Dissident
Open Thread 2020-34
Non-coronavirus news & views … April 28, 2020
Turkey’s Economic Troubles Give Putin Another Chance To Squeeze Erdogan
The wannabe Sultan of Turkey has told the Central Bank of the Republic to keep the value of the Turkish Lira below the 7 Lira per U.S. Dollar level.  bigger The central bank was also told to not raise its interest rate. The economy must keep growing! That left only one thing that the bank could do. It had to spend its foreign currency reserves to buy up Lira in the open market to keep it from falling further.  Source: Can Oker – bigger Unfortunately those reserves are limited:
Under Erdogan's rule the Turkish industry has taken up a lot of debt that was denominated in U.S. dollar. It has to be paid back in a foreign currency. A sinking Lira will make foreign denominated loans much harder to pay back. Higher interest rates will make local consumer debt more expensive and will reduce local demand. The debt fueled boom Erdogan had engineered over the last years will now be followed by a severe crash. That is likely to dampen Erdogan's appetite for further adventures in Syria and Libya. Qatar, his partner in those crimes, has its own trouble due to the deep drop in oil prices. The last time the Turkish Lira was under pressure Erdogan received a large loan from Qatar. But now Qatar itself has to borrow billions to stay afloat. That leaves the International Monetary Fund as the only place where Erdogan can receive fresh money. IMF loans come with conditions over which the U.S. has a large say. We can be sure that the Trump administrations will have 'conditions' that Erdogan will not like – at all. The situation creates another opening for Russia. Putin might offer Erdogan a helping hand, and a few billion dollars in loans from Russia's plentiful reserves, to finally bring him under control. Altogether we are in for some interesting developments. April 27, 2020
To Finally Kill The Nuclear Deal With Iran The U.S. Will Try To Rejoin It
On May 8 2018 the U.S. ceased its participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or nuclear deal with Iran. The New York Times now reports that the U.S. wants to be back in for some nefarious reason:
The real aim of the Trump administration is of course much wider:
The idea is idiotic and it will not work. There will be no 'snapback' sanctions and Iran will stick to the deal. The snapback option is part of the Dispute Resolution Mechanism that is laid out in article 36 and 37 of the JCPOA deal. UN Dispatch has a short description of what it means: Cont. reading: To Finally Kill The Nuclear Deal With Iran The U.S. Will Try To Rejoin It April 26, 2020
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-33
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
— Syria: Turkey is finally starting to clear the M4 highway as it was supposed to do for the last two years:
Yemen:
Hong Kong: Cleaning up the U.S. sponsored inciters of riots: Use as open thread … April 25, 2020
On The Coronavirus And Smoking, Infection Fatality Rates And More
On April 3 I had linked the chart below and remarked:
(A cytokine storm is an inappropriate inflammatory response by the immune system.)  Source – bigger It was really curious that during a respiratory disease epidemic current and former smokers were less prone to end up in an ICU than people with other preconditions. (It was also a psychological relief for this chain smoking blogger but should be NO reason for anyone to start this otherwise dangerous habit.) A French study has now confirmed this astonishing phenomenon: Cont. reading: On The Coronavirus And Smoking, Infection Fatality Rates And More April 24, 2020
Exceptionalistic Claptrap
The graphic below was published in a January 27 piece in Forbes. It shows the U.S., followed by the UK, to be the country which is best prepared for an epidemic.  bigger Life has since debunked that assertion. The U.S. and the UK were evidently less prepared than most other developed countries. But such delusions are typical for U.S. media. They are part of the constant sublime propaganda that indoctrinates the U.S. population to believe that their country is the best and greatest ever. Today the New York Times offers up a related piece of extreme self deluded claptrap:  bigger April 23, 2020
Open Thread 2020-32
Non-Covid-19 news & views … April 22, 2020
It Is Not ‘Authoritarian’ To Support Quarantine Measures – It Just Makes Sense
Yesterday James Corbett of The Corbett Report interviewed Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian about the corona crisis. At 18:30 minutes in Corbett finds it "disturbing" that some of the blogs who usually criticize governments, like Moon of Alabama, support the measures governments have taken to lower the speed of the novel coronavirus epidemic. Corbett then highlights a discussion on Twitter between me and the Off-Guardian account. It started with this:
I retweeted that and remarked:
OffGuardian retweeted my tweet and launched the discussion: Cont. reading: It Is Not ‘Authoritarian’ To Support Quarantine Measures – It Just Makes Sense April 21, 2020
U.S. Media Fall For Kim Jong Un Rumor From U.S. Government Financed Propaganda Outlet
U.S. media went crazy today over a rumor from South Korea which said that the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was near to death: 
What the CNN, NBC News and the NY Times did not say is that the 'South Korean media report' over grave illness of Kim Jong Un, on which their reporting was based, came from the Daily NK website and was itself based on a single anonymous source allegedly from North Korea. The South Korean and the Chinese government have both rejected the reports: Cont. reading: U.S. Media Fall For Kim Jong Un Rumor From U.S. Government Financed Propaganda Outlet
Negative Prices Mark The End Of U.S. Shale
Some companies had taken on the obligation to buy a large amount of West Texas Intermediate crude oil at a certain price. The price offered by the sellers looked cheap at the time when the contracts were signed. The settlement date of the contracts was April 21. Usually such contacts are settled in money but this time the sellers insisted on physically delivery the oil to the buyers. That was a problem. The buyers did not have the storage capacity to accept the oil they had bought months ago. They now had to accept a large amount they could not put anywhere. The only way out was to immediately sell it to someone else. But nobody was interested. All had their storage capacity already filled to the rim. The companies with the obligation to accept the oil from the producers then offered to pay others to take their oil. When the price started to go into negative territory I offered extra storage:
Offering to take the oil at -$50 was a bit too greedy. The WTI May option contract closed out at -$37.  bigger April 19, 2020
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-31
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
— On two Coronavirus pieces on other websites:
The piece debunks itself when it quotes a Swedish epidemiologist who says: April 18, 2020
The New Anti-China Campaign Is Built On Lies
To avoid self-examination of the failures that let the U.S. exceed the covid-19 casualty numbers of every other nation the powers that be decided to blame someone else. Trump's first attempt was to blame the World Health Organization for not providing all information. But 16 U.S. administration officials were embedded with the WHO in Geneva. They relayed real time updates of all information the WHO received. As the Democrats and the media did not join Trump in blaming the WHO another scapegoat was needed. Everyone then agreed that it China would be the most convenient target. The intensity of the current anti-China campaign reminds one of the run up to the war on Iraq. The people who now claim that 'China lied, people died' are the very same who ran the Iraq WMD campaign. But all the reports claiming Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were just fantasy. The reports of Chinese culpability are similar nonsense. As this is an election year both parties try to associate the other side with the new villain:
This will be bad for other important political issues: April 17, 2020
Ranting In A Time Of Plague
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? Collective tragedy is always a learning experience. So it has been for great wars, natural disasters, economic collapses, political revolutions. The COVID-19 pandemic is such a tragedy. Although the number of casualties may pale compared to the carnage of war, there are ancillary effects that leave us shocked and sobered. Most obviously, there is sudden onset of a severe economic depression with attendant social distress whose toll we will be registering for years to come. Then, there is the exposure of how incompetent our public institutions have become – the callous inhumanity of those who rule in Washington matched only by their clownish ineptitude. It is in the realm of these latter intangibles that we should look first for morals and lessons. Overriding all else is the spectacle of a President, duly elected by the American people, who is a malicious psychopath with not a single redeeming trait. A physical, intellectual and emotional spectre who would defy our imaginative powers were he not on display before our eyes. He has gathered around him a witch’s coven of scoundrels, crooks and crackpots as bereft of mind and ethics as he is. They also are inveterate liars; Trump himself is a congenital liar since clinical narcissism is inborn. Yet, we refer to this motley assemblage as an ‘administration’ – in our impulse to ‘normalize’ the abominable. No dry bill of particulars is necessary, nor could it do justice, to the squalid theater we see played out before us on a daily basis. This man, at this moment, is viewed favorably by 46% of the public. That reality eclipses everything else. There is no organized opposition worthy of the name. This is the second great failure of our democracy. The Democratic Party creaks under the weight of geriatric nominal leaders – plodding along without conviction, without will, without the integrity to free itself from the monied interests and the self-serving careerists who have dragged it into the mire. Yes, they may succeed, come November, in sparing the Republic the coup de grace of four more Trumpian years. This despite their suicidal instinct in choosing Joe Biden to bear the standard – a man barely robust enough to keep the banner from dragging in the dust on his slog along the campaign trail. This bunch can’t even get themselves to a microphone for a news clip at a time of historic crisis aggravated by the atrocious sins of the existing government. Surely, a first. Worried about Covid-19 contagion? Order a box of alcohol wipes from China. Instead, Biden makes a call to Trump for what both agree was a ‘nice conversation.’ What does that get him? April 16, 2020
The Recovery Will Not Be V-Shaped
During the last four weeks 22 million workers in the U.S. filed for unemployment insurance. Some 10 to 15 million additional workers were not eligible but also lost their jobs. Michael Hudson extrapolates from there:
A bonanza for the 1%. But the oligarchs who rule the United States are probably miscalculating this crisis:
The crisis will not be over before the fat lady sings. That lady has not even entered the house. A recovery will not be V-shaped. The economy will not spring back into action as soon as the lockdowns are over. It will be a long slog. The U.S. economy always depends on consumer resilience. But with more than 30 million people out of jobs there will be a huge fall of demand compared to before the pandemic. It is also likely that there will be more than one wave of the pandemic. During summer the case numbers will probably recede but they are likely to go up again during the fall. In between the pandemic will slowly burn through more of the population but mostly out of view because of many asymptomatic cases. When it comes back it will be in a different way. During the first wave the infections started first in place A then in place B then place C all depending on traffic and contact pattern. But the second wave will likely come, as it did during the Spanish flu, as one big wall that will hit all places at the same time. That will make it more difficult to allocate resources. Pandemics are, as Nassim Taleb and other have pointed out, fat tail events where normal statistics no longer apply. They are not symmetric Gaussian distributions curves where the way down from high case numbers has a similar shape as the way up had. The way down is actually much longer and more of a very slow decline which might even include additional eruptions. To expect a V-shaped return to a normal economy under these circumstance is foolish. The political consequences will be huge. A wide public demand for more social policies will come into conflict with a recalcitrant oligarchy. Can that conflict be solved within the current U.S. system? There are a few signs for hope. The first two vaccines developed in China are now in their first phase of human testing and more are coming. Some of them may actually work. A mass producible effective vaccine would mean that the fat lady has started to sing. There is also the curiosity that most children not only do not fall ill with the covid-19 disease but do not get infected at all. Further research into the phenomenon could point to a protection mechanism that might be exploitable for the protection of adults. On the sad side the Economist has started to systematically cover 'excess death' from the pandemic and finds that all official death numbers are serious undercounts. April 15, 2020
Open Thread 2020-30
Non-Covid news & views … April 14, 2020
Debunking Some Ideas About The Virus
We still do not know for certain where the virus that causes the current pandemic has come from. China's first known Covid-19 case has now been traced back to mid November. While the virus is most likely a natural creation the U.S. State Department officials now point to alleged insecurities at the safety level 4 laboratory in Wuhan which did research on similar viruses. It spreads unfounded rumors that the virus escaped from there. But the U.S. itself has many such laboratories with long documented security issues and there is reasonable suspicion that the real patient zero case has happened in the U.S. Science will eventually solve that conundrum. Until it does there is little to gain from further speculation about it. There is a loose group of people who think that the current pandemic is some conspiracy with a nefarious purpose. Some of them still compare the disease caused by the novel coronavirus to a flu. Some doubt that current restrictions of their personal liberties are legitimate and justified. Still others doubt the value of masks (Yesterday I deleted a comment that argued against masks.) It is probably a waste of time to counter the arguments of such people. But I will give it a try. The graphs show the normal mortality rates in the England and Wales and in New York City and the current deviations from it. The flu does not create such graphs. Nor do the lock-downs.  Source: Ed Conway / Skynews – bigger April 13, 2020
2020 Presidential Election Thread 08
April 12, 2020
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-29
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
I have been preaching to wear masks for reason.
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Use as open thread … |
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