Red Sea and Political Timidity

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In the wake of repeated Houthi terrorists’ rocket, missile, and drone attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden approaches to the Sea, BP has decided to abandon (BP is saying it’s a “pause”) this shorter and cheaper route and instead to go around Africa altogether to get to the Mediterranean Sea and to ports in Europe. Maersk has already made that decision; other shippers will follow, I predict.

BP’s statement, in part:

The safety and security of our people and those working on our behalf is BP’s priority. We will keep this precautionary pause under ongoing review, subject to circumstances as they evolve in the region.

The safety and security of commercial shipping in international shipping lanes also is the claimed purpose of the US Navy’s Freedom of Navigation operations, wherein our Navy often sails the sea lines of communication, often explicitly sailing contested routing through international waters. Simply sailing through, though, without doing anything other than being momentarily present, doesn’t accomplish much, as the terrorists’ actions in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are so clearly demonstrating.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is pretending to be trying to establish a coalition to protect trade through the Red Sea, but in the meantime, he’s not allowing the Navy to do anything more than shooting at those rockets, missiles, and drones that a couple of its ships can reach after those weapons already have been fired. Biden is not allowing our Navy to take overt and aggressive action to prevent those weapons from being launched in the first place. He’s not, for instance, allowing our Navy to destroy the Houthi’s launch sites throughout Houthi occupied Yemen, much less respond reactively to destroy those facilities involved in a particular attack.

Nor is he allowing our Navy to destroy Iran’s Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman ports, thereby seriously limiting Iran’s ability to supply the terrorists in Yemen.

Regarding his pretend coalition effort, Biden isn’t even working with Saudi Arabia in their effort to defeat the Houthi terrorists and restore the government of Yemen, which currently is resident in Saudi Arabia.

For those who object to the US acting as, spending treasure and equipment to be, the world’s policeman, what’s going on in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is a clear and present demonstration of what happens with a President too timid to act, of what happens when we stop being the world’s policeman.

The US needs to act, whether other nations have the courage to do so or not. If we act, they will follow, or if they don’t, we still will have acted. And we don’t have to extend as much support as we do to those nations happy to freeload off our efforts or too timid to act themselves, even in concert with us. The spending on that support can be reallocated to our policeman role.

CO2 Fans

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An atmospheric CO2 removal technology is gaining interest.

In western Texas, a major carbon removal plant that is under construction also recently got a $550 million investment from BlackRock. Once it is up and running in 2025, the plant will use fan-like devices roughly the size of tennis courts to pull carbon from the air and bury it underground, a process known as direct-air capture.

To the extent that this is a good idea—and I’m not convinced that it is—such direct-air capture facilities would be better placed in targeted locations, rather than being randomly situated. And few places are more random than the wide-open spaces of West Texas. That location may be OK for a proof of concept run, but….

If this technology works at scale, the facilities would be better placed just downwind of gas-, oil-, and coal-fired power generation plants to capture CO2 emissions as they are emitted and before they get diffused throughout the atmosphere.

Also: rather than burying the captured CO2, better to freeze it and use the dry ice for shipping perishables, since shipping times will be much longer with the sailing ships and horse-drawn overland wagons that will be the core of our shipping industry after the Left’s war on fossil-fuels is over.

And then recapture that CO2 for recycling….

FDA Official Shames…Who?

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Peter Marks, FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director, thinks he’s shaming Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo over Ladapo’s raising the question of whether the FDA has adequately monitored mRNA-based Wuhan Virus vaccines for possible contamination with extraneous DNA fragments. Marks is claiming—and he’s actually serious—that simply raising the question is intrinsically misleading.

Yet he claims this, also:

Given the dramatic reduction in the risk of death, hospitalization, and serious illness afforded by the vaccines, lower vaccine uptake is contributing to the continued death and serious illness toll of COVID-19[.]

The mortality rates for children from a Wuhan Virus infection are

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years
  • 8 per 100,000 for those aged 15 to 19 years

For adults, the rate is 0.5% or less—a maximum of 500 per 100,000. Hospitalization and less than hospitalized serious illness rates are even smaller—and the number of actual infections that are so trivial that the individuals don’t bother to see a doctor about it or even don’t notice the infection illustrates the growing lack of general severity of the Virus.

mRNA vaccines may lower those rates further, but calling such reductions “dramatic” is itself…misleading.

Marks shames himself with his distortion.

Meeting the Press

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One letter writer to The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday last Letters section commented on an earlier WSJ Joseph Epstein op-ed regarding the Old Stream Press’ Meet the Press, put on by performance theater network NBC. One comment by the correspondent drew my eye.

Instead, too many journalists frame their questions in ways designed to distort politicians’ messages to their political detriment.

A lot of that, though, is on the politician interviewee. Far too often, the interviewee is too timid—or too unable to think on his feet—to push back and point out that the interviewer is proceeding from false underlying premises with the question.

Too often, also, the interviewee is too timid—or too unable to think on his feet—to ask the interviewer for the evidence he has underlying his question, emphasizing that “reports” are not evidence, just rumor-mongering. And to the inevitable interviewer follow-up, “Do you deny those reports?” answering, “You’re still not offering any evidence.”

Relatedly, too many interviewees are too timid to simply talk through an interviewer’s interruptions, and then at the end of his answer to call out the interviewer’s insult to the segment’s viewers, pointing out that the interviewer with his interruptions is telling the audience that he thinks they’re too stupid to decide for themselves what they will hear and how they will interpret it.

It takes two to properly play an interviewer’s dominance game.

Katie Hobbs—Virtue Signaling?

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Arizona’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs is pretending to distance herself from her fellow Progressive-Democrat, President Joe Biden. She’s complaining that he’s not doing enough regarding our southern border—Arizona’s in particular—and so she has called out her State’s National Guard to send them to Arizona’s border with Mexico. At the same time, she wants more Federal aid—because all solutions to all problems consist of more money in the minds of Progressive-Democrats.

[W]e can’t stand alone, she says,

Arizona needs resources and manpower to reopen the Lukeville crossing; manage the flow of migrants; and maintain a secure, orderly, and humane border….

She doesn’t want to close Arizona’s border to illegal aliens—she can’t tell the difference between migrants and illegal aliens any better than can Biden—she simply wants to “manage” their flow into our nation. Since that’s at the core of Biden’s policy, also, Hobbs’ complaining is simply to draw attention to her own precious self.