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By Jo Nova
The big losers in this war, apart from some former Iranian leaders, appear to be China, and NATO.
In the last two months China has lost easy cheap access to cheap oil from Venezuela and now Iran. China was getting around the sanctions and buying discounted Iranian oil through a shadow fleet of ships. It was acquiring as much as 80% of Iranian oil production. Now it has to pay market prices and fight for a limited supply.
Meanwhile the divide between the US and Europe is suddenly very obvious. NATO has been shown to be an empty shell.
Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian, explains the big picture:
GB News: Basically, is this a victory for Donald Trump? Does Does this ceasefire represent a victory for his sort of strategic campaign?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, if it’s honored, it is because when all of the rhetoric and all of the politics vanish, and if they abide by the agreement and we stop and the straits stay open and … if we’re viligant — then it is.
He [Trump] comes back and he says when I came into office Iran had […]
By Jo Nova
If someone wanted to sabotage Western science, this would be a useful technique
A research team has used AI to analyze 2.6 million cancer papers and found a quarter of a million have used suspicious tortured phrases, incorrect reagents, fabricated data and altered or reused figures — all hallmarks of fakery at the industrial paper-mill. A dumb AI will change “energy use” to vitality utilization or convert “raw data” to crude information.
The commentariat is blaming profit and greed for the flood of fake papers, but what if this is no accident? If I were an enemy of The West, and I wanted to sabotage scientific research, this would work like a DDOS on science. Researchers would spend hours running meta-analyses of dud results. They might change their own experiments, scurrying down pointless rabbit holes in search of an effect that doesn’t exist. Or, they might drop a useful approach if they thought someone had tried it and failed. And it can’t be too good for the cancer patients either, can it?
Even businesses might find it appealing to slow down or confuse the competition. Or perhaps they’d like to quote a paper to get their […]
Arson must be one of the easiest crimes to hide by anyone half competent, but in Greece arrests are already happening. People were caught with cans of gasoline. There are so many fires, the Supreme Court prosecutor has called for an investigation into possible organised arson and is asking for sweeping investigative powers. On social media people are blaming arsonists and slow or inept government responses.
In Media-World, people are blaming climate change, because if the world was a degree cooler, the fires would put themselves out or something. Who knows?
Coincidentally, over in Algeria, strange things are happening too. The Interior Minister says 50 fires were started at the same time. In Turkey, recent arson is suspected to be a terrorist activity. A few days ago the Israeli airforce bombed Hamas targets to “counter #arson attacks“. And in California a professor of criminology was actually tracked, caught and arrested for setting fires “on the edge” of the huge Dixie blaze. He might be nuts, but the others may have a plan. Has anyone asked them?
Apparently CO2 turns nice people into arsonists, but it’s surely also possible there may be other interests at work, or who knows, even […]
Good and bad news about long term vaccine effectiveness is coming out of Israel. Protection from catching Covid plummets after a few months. Only 1 in 6 people who were vaccinated against Covid in January still have enough protection left to stop themselves catching and spreading Covid. The good news is that five out of six still have good protection against hospitalization and severe disease.
Thanks to David Archibald who says “The coronavirus vaccines are an immunological Potemkin village”
The Israeli data above is what sent the markets sliding on Monday. Ouch!
Vaccine efficacy in Israel from people vaccinated in January, Febuary, March and April this year.
Forget herd immunity and Vax-passports
The new results mean taking a vaccine is more a personal decision about risk benefits, less “one for the team”, though it may reduce the risk of transmission. Toss out the idea that a vaccination passport offers meaningful protection and get used to the idea that people can and will catch Covid from the double vacced. There is little medical justification for giving extra rights or free access to vaccinated people.
Israel used the Pfizer vax mostly.
Efficacy against infection, asymptomatic and symptomatic, falls […]
Despite doing everything it could to gain herd immunity Iran starts on second wave
Iran was one of the first countries to succumb to the pandemic, and so it is for the second wave. Back on Feb 25th Iran emerged as a new epicentre — whereupon smart nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Ankara, Georgia and Tajikistan immediately closed borders and flights from Iran. Rich nations with Expert-Swamps, however, would wait until they actually caught cases before they stopped the flights.
Iranian leaders worked to spread the virus: they were slow to close religious institutions, and quick to claim they’d be immune, right up until the day the leaders started catching the virus themselves. They declared quarantine was stone age, and shipped their masks off to China, but like everywhere, when things got bad, they started quarantine.
The peak came and went and things were headed in the right direction so Iran started releasing restrictions from April 11th. By May 2nd, less than a thousand new cases a day were being recorded. But five days later cases had doubled. Now they are back to where they were when they started releasing restrictions.
Just […]
Amazing. Sinbad reports on the situation in Iran. He is a commenter here who speaks the language. I can’t confirm this except to say that #Coronavirusupdates Iran looks like everything he is describing. Officially there are only 388 cases and 34 deaths. But on twitter, just like China, censorship and denial and so much more. Mass graves. Corrupt officials. Mass spraying of the streets. But if there is no attempt to stop it spreading (no lockdown like China has done) this will truly run wild. Those poor people. Germany closed flights in January, related to other problems in Iran. In the last week Iraq, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, UAE, Kuwait all closed borders with Iran. Australia, with lower medical standards imported a case from Iran today instead. – Jo
UPDATE: Finally, today the Australian government banned arrivals from Iran without a two week holiday stopover somewhere. That’s a lot better but should be mandatory proper quarantine. The government now has the arduous job of tracking the 40 people (or more) she may have infected and the people those victims may have infected (their families). Those 40+ people now have the stressful wait to find out if they got “lucky”. […]
On twitter, there are a few photos suggesting that in Iran people are collapsing in the streets. The semiofficial news agencies are reporting the death toll in Qom alone is 50, but the official toll stands at 12, out of 61 reported cases. Iranian officials deny that Qom’s death toll is 50, but admitted 900 suspected cases were being tested. Some of the deaths are reported to be doctors and some of the infected are officials suggesting the virus has been spreading for weeks and is underreported. For example: the Chancellor of Qom’s Medical Sciences University, Dr. Mohammad-Reza Ghadir, had tested positive.
If official stats are correct the death rate is 20%. It almost certainly isn’t, but either this virus is deadlier than ever, or Iranian officials are hiding a broader spread. Either way, every nation with high risk people (say, people over 60 years old) might consider suspending the flights til we know more. We would all probably be dealing with what Iran is right now if we had not closed flights to China weeks ago.
The infection from Iran has spread to six countries so far –– Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Lebanon, Canada and Oman. But flights from […]
Think this is pandemonium?
Changing by the hour:
Israel stopped allowing Koreans and Japanese visitors to enter while planes were in the air. Turkey and Pakistan closed borders with Iran. (Some Iraq did yesterday). Afghanistan followed. Italy now has 134 cases. Two days ago it thought it had only 3. 26 people have been hospitalized. Iran has 43 official cases — up from 3 on Saturday. South Korea has 602 cases, including 6 deaths. Up from 31 cases on Feb 18th. Nine Korean nationals who visited Israel tested postive so now 200 people are in quarantine in Israel. Jordan has barred entry to the country to any citizens of China, Iran, and South Korea
This is the danger of too many open borders and not enough testing. If things are this far advanced in Italy and Iran and South Korea what’s happening under the veil in Africa and Indonesia, and so many other places?
Choices for the West include closing risky borders now, or later perhaps closing schools, events, football matches, movies, parties, and maybe elective surgery.
Italy –a lesson in how fast things move
Current tally: 2 dead, 134 infections and 26 are severe (that’s 19%, and who knows […]
It will only take 50 plants like this, and $15 billion spare dollars, to replace the Liddell coal station (8,000GWh), now slated for closure in 2022.
$300m handout to Saudi tycoon for solar farm
Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.
AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030…
But we need more chinese-built glass panels that make green weather-controlling electrons.
Lucky solar power is so competitive. Look at the money roll…
The Moree solar farm generates 150,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year, about 0.08 per cent of the 200 terawatt hours produced on the national electricity market every year. The project is forecast to collect about $50m in payments over the next four years and $90m in the following decade under the existing […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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