Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Some 300,000 people in Beirut have been left homeless by the enormous explosion at the city’s port on Tuesday, which left it without a means of importing by sea. Half of the city has been damaged. 80% of Lebanon’s grain is imported, and the grain silos were destroyed. Thousands of […]
Trump nearly provokes International Incident, Wrongly saying Beirut Explosion a “Bomb”
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A massive ammonium nitrate explosion rocked Beirut’s port on Tuesday, sending up a mushroom cloud that reminded some of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, damaging buildings, blowing out windows, overturning cars, wounding over 3,000 people at least, and leaving dozens dead. Flying glass and debris were responsible for many of the injuries. […]
A Warning Signal for US? Corruption, Gov’t Gridlock, Pandemic, drive half a Million Lebanese Children into Hunger
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Lebanon, a small country of 4.7 million citizens and another 1.5 million Syrian refugees and 400,000 Palestinian refugees, is facing a perfect storm. Its corrupt political elite has permitted a near-collapse of a once-solid banking system. Government services are paralyzed and there are electricity outages. The country, which is a […]
Elon Musk may have been Joking, but the Flaky Theory that Aliens built the Pyramids is Faintly Racist
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Egyptian scientists and archeologists replied in a level-headed but firm way to billionaire Elon Musk’s tweet that aliens built the pyramids. It isn’t clear whether Musk was just joking around, though he sometimes talks about the possibility that advanced aliens are watching us, and thinks it statistically possible that alien […]
Iran’s Khamenei: Not going to help Trump get Reelected by Negotiating, and besides, America is Collapsing
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Iran’s clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei, knows that Trump’s reelection campaign is in big trouble. And, he thinks Trump wants a dramatic foreign policy breakthrough to impress the American voter. There aren’t many foreign policy breakthroughs to be had nowadays. Iran is one of the few. A Pew Research Center poll […]
“Never Seen a Decline of this Magnitude” – ExxonMobil, Crashed by Covid, gets taste of looming Electric Vehicle Crisis
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ashton Nichols at The Dallas Morning News reports that ExxonMobil lost over $1 billion in the second quarter, up from a $600 million lost in the first. Year on year, its revenues are down 33% for the first half of this year. It has been forced to close down half […]
How Trump broke America: Economy plummets historic 33%, Covid Deaths at 1500/ day, and 40 mn could lose Homes
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump’s refusal last winter to pull out all the stops to mount an effective national coronavirus response has broken the legs of America. On Wednesday, over 1500 coronavirus deaths were reported nationwide, a tally not seen since May. Over 150,000 Americans have died of the disease, and the prospect is […]
US Bases in Qatar, UAE go on Alert as Iran Fires Ballistic Missiles at Mock-up of US Aircraft Carrier
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sepahnews quotes Brigadier Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Aerospace Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as saying that his unit was able to launch ballistic missiles from bunkers the depths of the earth for the first time in world history. (He did not explain what he meant […]
3 Dead as Iraqi Crowds Protest Electricity Outages in 124° Heat; Have US and Climate Crisis left Iraq Unviable?
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Tuesday, the temperature in Baghdad hit 124° F. (51.2°). Just for perspective, the all-time highest temperature recorded for Asia was in Kuwait five years ago, at 129° F. Scientists consider an average temperature of 95° the highest consistent with habitability. Since these temperatures and higher will become more and […]
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