Posts Tagged ‘Sri Lanka’

Two Doses of Neil Oliver

Wednesday, July 13th, 2022

First up: Scottish commentator Neil Oliver wonders about all the questions we’re not allowed to ask about Flu Manchu.

Daily Mail online carried a headline on the 8th of June: Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register.

This is SADS – an acronym that stands for Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – and according to the Royal Australian College of GPs, it occurs most commonly in people under 40. This is properly scary; I don’t mind telling you. Healthy young people are going to their beds of an evening and not waking up ever again, or otherwise going about their everyday business and dropping dead, for no identifiable medical reason.

The best anyone in the health professions can apparently do is describe it as mysterious, baffling even, that there are people under 40 dropping in their traces for no known cause. At the same time, around the world, there have been reports of many hundreds of sports men and women dying suddenly and unexpectedly in the past year – super fit individuals uniquely focused on their own health – keeling over dead, often on the field of play.

Here at home we have had updated information campaigns about how important it is to be aware of the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. It has been deemed appropriate to remind us as well that heart attacks are not unknown in children. It’s almost as if we’re not to be unduly alarmed by the sight of passers-by dropping to their knees and clutching at their chests. Elsewhere there is a poster campaign about a rise in the number of cases of shingles. The small print on the posters mentions shingles may strike people with lowered immune systems. Fancy that.

Deaths have been attributed by coroners to the Covid vaccines. The numbers are disputed, but people have died on account of the jabs. That much at least is undeniable. Around the world there are millions of cases of alleged adverse reactions to the jabs – lives severely compromised in some cases. I won’t get into the numbers, because those are always disputed too – but the facts remain. People are dying.

The elephant in the room here is the Covid-19 vaccines – and again I make no apology at all about banging on about this topic week after week. The push to move on, to leave all talk of Covid and pandemic behind us, is palpable and, I would say, downright sinister. I am nowhere near ready to move on – not while there is still so much we do not know, so much we are not allowed to say, think and ask.

We are told all about Covid 19 – and all manner of ways in which it might affect health long after a person has recovered from the initial infection. But as well as the pandemic, the other momentous arrival among us – indeed in just the past year and a half – is the biggest mass vaccination campaign in the history of the world – vaccination with products that had emergency approval, but in my opinion are experimental and for which no long-term data is available – on account of their being brand new and just out of the box.

Billions of people around the world have submitted to the procedure. In a coercive and bullying atmosphere created by politicians and the media, that was mandatory in feel, if not in fact, unknown and unknowable numbers of people did so simply to keep their jobs, to get on a plane and go on holiday or to a gig – and yet in the midst of one report after another of otherwise unexplained sudden deaths in the past 18 months or so, the only emergent variable, the only new thing in the world that we are not allowed to discuss, absolutely not allowed to discuss far less point accusatory fingers at, is the mass vaccination programme.

Again, I ask the question I posed at the top of this piece – are we stupid? Or are we just being treated as if we’re stupid? Which is it?

Next: Oliver notes how mass protests and even open revolt against the green globalist/Build Back Better agenda are being downplayed or ignored by the media:

Sri Lanka was a product of that government following, you know, the the madness of [World Economic Forum] inspired policies: Net Zero, the stripping of fertilizers, and all the rest of it…wholesale strife, collapsing crops and all the rest of it. You would think in a sane world the politicians in each of the countries would respond to the people, but I suspect they won’t. We saw something similar in Canada with the trucker’s freedom convoys, but look what happened there. Obviously Justin Trudeau was was told to get a grip of that situation. He clamped down on it violently, arrested bank accounts and took away the funding for that movement.

Bit on Sri Lanka skipped.

I think what you’re looking at in The Netherlands, for example, is the deliberate dismantling of the land owning class. 85% percent of the of the land in The Netherlands is held by farmers, and has been for generations, and that’s an inconvenient situation for globalist leftist politicians who’ve got other ideas for the land, which is specifically to build houses to cope with the with the levels of immigration that are going on. They’ve empowered themselves the politicians to help themselves to 30 percent of the Dutch farmer’s land, and surprise, surprise! Just as I suspect you would or I would, if the government came into our homes and said they were taking 30% everything we had we owned and had worked for, the farmers have said no…It’s a blatant land grab.

It gets harder and harder to ignore the intent by by leftist globalist governments to return us to some form of feudalism. All these people like us owning property, owning homes, living lives independent of the state. You know what the intention is there, to take people’s independence away. Take away their property, take away the land, and if you control the farmland, you control the food. And if you control the food, you control the people. So you can plainly see what the agenda is.

One need not agree with every one of Oliver’s conclusions to agree that the pattern he deduces, of elites acting against the best interests of the countries they govern and the people they ostensibly serve, seems very real.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Sri Lanka Is Screwed

Thursday, June 23rd, 2022

Remember how Sri Lanka managed to wreck agricultural yield by forcing the country to use organic fertilizer? “Not only had Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides, and fungicides resulted in massive food shortages, it also led to the doubling in price of rice, vegetables, and other market staples.”

Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Sri Lanka’s prime minister is increasing efforts to revive the country’s “completely collapsed” economy amid a lack of foreign exchange reserves and severe shortages of essential items.

“We are now facing a far more serious situation beyond the mere shortages of fuel, gas, electricity, and food. Our economy has faced a complete collapse,” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told parliament on June 22.

“It is no easy task to revive a country with a completely collapsed economy, especially one that is dangerously low on foreign reserves,” he said.

This video goes into more depth of just how badly Sri Lanka is screwed.

Some takeaways:

  • “The government’s gross mismanagement in agriculture is just a small symptom in a much larger problem. Sri Lanka has run out of money and is now facing down the barrel of complete economic collapse.”
  • “In a span of just two years, its reserves of foreign currency has gone from $9.2 billion to just $50 million, not enough to cover a single day’s worth of imports, and not nearly enough to cover the $6.6 billion it needs to make loan payments. On April 12th, the government announced it will no longer be making such payments as a result it’s been cut off from international loans.”
  • “Basic necessities are hard to come by and daily rolling blackouts are shutting down businesses.”
  • Sri Lanka may be the first poorly managed developing country to fall, but it won’t be the last.
  • On paper, it shouldn’t be a basket case. It had a thriving tourism industry before a 2019 terrorist attack and 2020’s Flu Manchu.
  • “Sri Lanka, being a small developing country, imports a huge amount of commodities. As such, it’s been running a large trade deficit.”
  • Enter the nepotism:

    Strongman Gotabaya Rajapaksa Gota built a name for himself viciously ending the civil war as head of the ministry of defense, with his brother Mahinda acting as president from 2005 to 2015. Gota ran on the promise of bringing forth vistas of prosperity and splendor in wake of an opposition party seen as too weak to handle domestic threats. Gota’s party won a landslide victory in parliament and he appointed his brother as prime minister. With a two-thirds majority, Gota quickly got to work rewriting the constitution, allowing him to appoint many top-level officials, including ministers and judges. He stuffed these positions with relatives, and has been slowly cementing greater unrestrained power.

  • How did he deal with the tourism downturn? He started printing money. “The budget deficit widened and its stockpile of foreign currency started to burn away.”
  • “Now more than ever, Sri Lanka was burning through its foreign reserves. This was further accelerated by the government’s desire to keep the rupees exchange rate at 200 rupees equal to one US dollar.” In the post-Bretton Woods world, fixed exchange rates are disasters waiting to happen.
  • The attempt to defend the rupee meant that foreign currency reserves went from $9.2 billion to just $1.6 billion in 2021.
  • “This caused the government to enact strange policies, like banning the importation of fertilizer in hopes of easing its trade deficit. Claiming the ban was to make Sri Lanka organic was simply a way to conceal its dire situation.” Yes, cutting back the ability of your own people to grow food in order to hide the manifest incompetence of your economic policies is quite the recipe for happiness.
  • Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and prices for food and energy skyrocketed.
  • “Basic necessities in Sri Lanka have become too expensive. The rupee is now just half of its original value. Schools have stopped testing for certain grades because they can’t buy ink.”
  • “The government has instituted daily 15 hour blackouts to save on energy imports but they have crippled industries. The nation has declared a state of emergency as massive mobs attack politicians and even set roadblocks to prevent them from escaping the country.”

    Sri Lanka may be the first, but it won’t be the last.

    With rapid global commodity inflation, supply shortages, and the likely coming global recession, many nations appear to be on the tipping point. There is growing unrest in Tunisia because of prices. Pakistan’s currency is plummeting and Argentina’s economy is straining under the weight of massive debt. The longer current conditions persist, the more likely we are to see what is happening in Sri Lanka to happen across the globe.

  • Green Delusions Bring Chaos And Death

    Tuesday, May 17th, 2022

    It’s one thing when affluent Granola Americans try to green their own lives via expensive organic food, solar panels and electric cars, but quite another when they write their delusional green policy choices into law. Just as reliance on trendy renewable energy helped trigger Texas ice storm blackouts, so too have other government regulations led to serious, pressing problems.

    Take Sri Lanka as the first example:

    In less than a year since Sri Lanka became the first country in the world to fully ban conventional agriculture, an economic crisis of epic proportions has gripped the island nation, launched waves of protests, and on Monday prompted the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. Sri Lanka’s pivot to organic farming — with a ban on synthetic fertilizers — triggered a drastic decline in the production of critical crops like tea and rice, something that many agricultural experts had foreshadowed for months.

    “Predicted” is the word you want to use there. Or “foretold” if you want to be a little grandiloquent and Biblical for dramatic effect.

    And lo, just as the prophecy foretold, it came to pass:

    Most accounts show that production dropped between 20 percent to 50 percent of what it was prior to the switch, leaving many of the country’s 22 million people in dire straits. These happenings paint the picture of the clear connection between synthetic crop protection products and food security. And not only had Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides, and fungicides resulted in massive food shortages, it also led to the doubling in price of rice, vegetables, and other market staples.

    Just as with Lysenkoism or Mao’s war on birds, reliance on delusional theory rather than actual science led to famine and death.

    By the time Sri Lanka opted to reverse most of its mandate over the winter, the situation had gone too far.

    The turmoil spurred shortages of electricity and other goods and services in Sri Lanka. Many people have died — and scores injured — in economic- and hunger-related protests, and Rajapaksa required a military rescue this week as chaos closed in around him.

    Last summer, prior to the changeover to full organic, 30 national experts wrote to Rajapaksa’s brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa…

    “Would you like a side order of Nepotism with your Green Delusion Special?”

    …outlining their concern over this seismic policy shift. While they recognize the goals of the president’s program, they proposed a phased, consultative approach — with actual experts — rather than cold turkey, emotive mandates.

    “Prior to this policy, the government had unsuccessfully tried to commercialize farm land, which is the biggest commercial asset the country has. So many of us think this was another way to try and get farmers to leave their land, or to weaken the farmers’ position and enable a land grab,” Vimukthi de Silva, an organic farmer in Rajanganaya, told The Guardian.

    So just like here, the sheep’s clothing of pious environmentalism hides the ravenous rent-seeking wolf of public subsidy cash grabs.

    Closer to home, anti-fossil fuel regulations to fight “Global Warming” have left America dangerously short of refining capacity.

    We are now reaching the point where the cost of diesel fuel is making some goods too expensive to transport. One trucker told the Orlando Fox affiliate yesterday that, “The cost of diesel is single-handedly taking us out of the game one by one no matter how big you are. . . . If you’re getting paid $2 per mile you’re not taking that load no matter if it is baby formula or orange juice because the cost of diesel is $5 plus. You just can’t take that load.”

    Tractor-trailer trucks loaded up with goods are heavy, meaning that they average “only 6.5 miles per gallon. Their efficiency ranges wildly between 3 miles per gallon going up hills to more than 23 miles per gallon going downhill.” Because of their low fuel economy, trucks have massive gas tanks — tanks with a capacity between 120 and 150 gallons — and some trucks may have two tanks for longer hauls. In other words, on one full tank of diesel, a truck can travel 780 to 975 miles. But as of this morning, filling up the tank for that trip will cost $668 to $836 — a cost of 85 cents per mile.

    Keep in mind, “A majority of trucking companies pay [drivers] between $0.28 and $0.40 cents per mile according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. A few companies do pay up to $0.45 cents per mile.”

    The default setting of President Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and a lot of other Democrats is that if something is expensive, it is because some company is being greedy, and that the way to “bring down inflation” to “make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.”

    But the cost of a gallon of unleaded gasoline or diesel fuel is not just a matter of how greedy an oil company feels on any given day and has very little to do with how much that company is paying in taxes. The cost of crude oil makes up 59 percent of the cost of gallon of regular gasoline, and just 49 percent of the cost of diesel. Refining is a slightly bigger share of the cost of a gallon of diesel fuel than of the cost of a gallon of regular gas — 23 percent for diesel to 18 percent for regular, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Distribution and marketing costs make up 18 percent of diesel costs.

    And keep in mind, federal taxes on diesel are slightly higher than those on regular gasoline — 24 cents per gallon on diesel compared to 18 cents per gallon on regular.

    Explanation of sales tax cost of diesel snipped.

    But if we really want to know why the cost of diesel is increasing faster than the cost of regular gasoline, we need to look at those refining costs. It doesn’t matter how much we “drill, baby, drill,” unless we also have the ability to “refine, baby, refine,” — or we become dependent upon foreign refiners.

    Back in 2020, U.S. oil-refinery capacity peaked at 19 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. But because of the pandemic, and the delayed decision to permanently shut down the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery after a major accident in 2019, U.S. refinery capacity declined significantly during that year. (PES was the largest oil refinery on the East Coast and refined 335,000 barrels per day.)

    In addition to the PES refinery, five more shut down over the course of 2020: the Shell refinery in Convent, La., the Tesoro Marathon refinery in Martinez, Calif., the HollyFrontier refinery in Cheyenne, Wyo., the Western Refining refinery in Gallup, N.M., and the Dakota Prairie refinery in Dickinson, N.D. Those six collectively refined more than 1 million barrels of oil per day.

    Thus, the U.S. started 2021 with its lowest annual refining capacity in six years, and that capacity did not expand significantly over the rest of the year. And as the pandemic’s effects on American life faded, month by month, demand for fuel increased — not just from drivers but from trucking and shipping companies, construction companies — remember, 98 percent of all energy use in the construction sector comes from diesel — and from airlines and other consumers of jet fuel.

    Why are we experiencing these stunning fuel prices? Because we’re getting back to pre-pandemic levels of demand, while our refineries are pumping out about a million fewer gallons of fuel per day than they did before the pandemic. And you know what happens when you mix lower supply with higher demand.

    Right now, someone is likely shouting, “Reopen those closed refineries, then!” But that’s not so easy.

    The former PES refinery complex in Philadelphia is being demolished. The Shell refinery is slated to become an “alternative fuels complex,” and it’s a similar transition for the Tesoro refinery. The HollyFrontier refinery is already converted to processing biofuels, as is the Dakota Prairie refinery. (Certain environmentalists will denounce the greedy oil companies and praise the companies producing environmentally friendly biofuels, never stopping to check and realize that many of them are the same companies.)

    Wait, I haven’t even gotten to the bad news: Chemical maker Lyondell Basell Industries announced in April that the company will permanently close its Houston crude-oil refinery by the end of 2023. That plant refines about 263,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel per day.

    We almost never build oil refineries in the U.S. anymore. According to the EIA, the newest refinery in the United States is the Targa Resources Corporation’s site in Channelview, Texas, which began operating in 2019 and processes 35,000 barrels per day. Before that, the newest refinery with significant downstream unit capacity was Marathon’s facility in Garyville, La. That facility came online in 1977.

    Back during the late Bush and early Obama years, Hyperion Energy attempted to start a massive project in South Dakota, aiming to build what would have been the sixth-largest oil refinery in the nation. But the project grew mired in red tape and environmentalist opposition and eventually was canceled. We would have experienced widespread shortages of refined fuels many years ago if some companies had not completed large-scale expansions of existing refineries.

    And so, President Biden’s fuming about oil companies not drilling and demanding they “use it or lose it” is something of a red herring; it would not do U.S. oil consumers a lot of good to dramatically expand the supply of crude oil if there isn’t enough refinery capacity to turn that oil into useful products. And right now, there are no major projects planned to build new oil refineries or expand capacity at the existing ones.

    Gripped by their green delusions, Democrats have long pledged to make fossil fuel too expensive to use. What they didn’t tell you, however, is that the side effect would be to make it too expensive for truckers to actually transport your food to you.

    LinkSwarm for April 15, 2022

    Friday, April 15th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to a smallish LinkSwarm! My taxes are done, but I’m playing catchup on just about everything else.

  • The Biden Administration is all-in on grooming and mutilating children.

    While testifying before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Xavier Becerra affirmed that yes, his department was in favor of taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for minors. “So for the record, you favor HHS funding . . . for sex-reassignment surgeries for minors?” Lauren Boebert, (R, Colo.) asked. Becerra answered:

    I will do everything I can to defend any American, including children, whether or not they fit the categories you have mentioned or not. And if they talk about gender-affirming care, I am there to protect the rights of any American.

    In other words: yes.

  • Related:

  • “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House.” I’m shocked, shocked that people who encouraged riots to help out Democrats are corrupt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Biden: Surely Democrats everywhere will embrace my scaled-back Build Back Better bag of bloated bilge! Kyrsten Sinema: “LOL! Get rekt!
  • “Brian A. Benjamin, the lieutenant governor of the state of New York, has been indicted on federal bribery charges.”
  • Is Sri Lanka facing starvation?
  • Democrats on Twitter: “We’re totally going to defeat Ron DeSantis!” Deantis: [Raises $100 million for reelection.]
  • Neither snow no rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. But multiple assaults? Yeah, they’re drawing the line there. So no more mail for a block of Santa Monica, California, until they fix the problem. This is your mail on one-party Democratic control.
  • Get A Rope Part 1: “Hospital Refuses Father-To-Son Kidney Transplant Over COVID Jab.”
  • Get A Rope Part 2: Two puppies stolen at gunpoint in D.C.. Actually, never mind. Hangin’s too good for ’em…
  • Ken Paxton has a 30 point lead over George P. Bush in the Texas Attorney General runoff.
  • News of Our Media Elites: “WNYC’s Jami Floyd accused of plagiarism in 45 articles dating back to 2010.” Also: “Floyd, 57, was the director of New York Public Radio’s Race & Justice Unit.” What are the odds? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of media elite follies, CNN+ is sucking the farts out of dead cats.

    In theory, at least, the role of an organization such as McKinsey is to ask, “Why?” Everyone wants to start a streaming service. Why does yours make sense? If CNN were run by thoughtful people, it might have taken the opportunity to ask some fundamental questions of itself before procuring a new toy: “Who are we?” “What do we do?” “Are we good at it?” “Why do our staff keep getting themselves embroiled in scandals?” “Has anyone heard Brianna Keilar utter a single sentence that might be termed useful?”

    Had these questions been asked, it might have dawned on CNN’s leaders that the way in which Brian Stelter sees the network is not, in fact, the way in which anyone else sees the network. Had these questions been asked, it might have become apparent to CNN’s leaders that Americans do not regard CNN and its staff as brave, diligent, indispensable firefighters, that consumers do not believe Jim Acosta to be a hero, and that, when people think about America’s turbulent democracy, the last person who comes to their minds as a fix is Jim Sciutto. Had these questions been asked, CNN’s leaders might have learned that the network’s obsession with Fox is annoying to viewers, and that launching CNN+ with a flagship documentary, The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, would probably send the wrong message. As for the network’s slogan: “The Most Trusted Name in News”? One might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.

    Thus, the entirely predictable disaster that is unfurling before our eyes. And, thus, CNN’s bafflement that it has become a joke. And what a joke! 10,000 people a day? That’s the size of the home crowd at a Durham Bulls minor-league-baseball game. It’s the number of people who attend “MerPalooza,” a “celebration of mermaids and mermen,” or the international UFO convention and film festival, or BronyCon.

    I think this comparison is unfair to BronyCon, which has historically attracted a much lower percentage of sex offenders than CNN…

  • Is Highland Park, Michigan, the worst city in America?
  • There are numerous local corruption stories involving payoffs, but few that involve a police chief’s Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band. Take a bow, newly convicted felon Tim Vasquez!
  • “Liberals Outraged To Learn 10% Of Twitter Now Owned By African-American.”
  • “Not To Be Outdone, Bill Gates Buys 9.2% Of MySpace.”
  • Friend-of-the-blog Michael Sumbera gets gets a profile of his store, Classical Music of Spring, which I encourage you to patronize.
  • Speaking of music:

    OK, not really…