Clap on, clap off, the clapper!

 By Mike Luckovich

They had no air force, they had no navy

 By Broelman

Iran talks continue

 By Bruce MacKinnon

Feeble US recovery due to Trump

This chart shows the average of the PMI and ISM indices for the US (before 2011, it's the ISM alone), broken up into the services and the manufacturing sectors, and the average of the two, shown by the blue line.  (The relationship between the "whole-economy" PMI/ISM index and GDP is shown in the bottom chart, from 2000 to 2026, but I haven't updated the GDP data to include the latest release.)

After previous slowdowns or recessions, the rebound from the low point has been strong.  This time round it has been feeble.  Note how at the beginning of 2025, a strengthening recovery was aborted by Trump's tariffs.  Then, just as the economy started to pick up again, Trump's Iran war has caused a renewed downturn.  Now, so far, it's only one month of slowdown.  But if the Iran war and the oil blockade continue, which seems all too likely, this downtrend will continue.

The 1973 and 1979 oil crises produced deep recessions and strong inflation surges.  It looks as if this will happen again.

click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

For some unknown reason

 By Benjamin Slyngstad

Dire straits of Hormuz

 By Patrick Blower

I've got a plan

 By Patrick Blower

Your son was a loser

By Michael de Adder, with reference to the film, Saving Private Ryan.

Iran or the US?

 By Dave Granlund

All you need is a sharpie

 By Jonathan Brown

Iran deal

 A cartoon by Patrick Chapette

400,000 Europeans die from air pollution each year

The Shard, in Smog.  Source: Reuters

From Reuters:

Poor air quality caused about 400,000 premature deaths in Europe in 2016, the most recent year data is available, and almost every city-dwelling European is exposed to pollution levels that exceed healthy levels, according to a report on Wednesday.

“Air pollution is currently the most important environmental risk to human health,” the European Environment Agency (EEA), the EU’s health agency, said in the report.

The report’s author, EEA air quality expert Alberto González Ortiz, said that while the level of dangerous particles in European cities was dropping, it was not dropping fast enough.

“We have not yet reached the EU standards and of course we are far from reaching the WHO (World Health Organization) standards,” Ortiz said.

EU law currently requires countries to assess the level, notably in urban areas, of a range of pollutants, including ozone and particulate matter, and take action if certain limits are hit.

Particle pollution in cities has become the target of tougher restrictions after the EU’s top court ruled in June that cities needed to act if pollution levels were exceeded in a single black spot rather than based on an average across a region.

In July, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, asked the EU’s Court of Justice to take action against Spain and Bulgaria over their poor air quality, warning the countries were failing to protect citizens against pollution.

EU limits are set per pollutant and in 2017, 16 out of the EU’s 28 member states reported at least one case of levels of nitrogen dioxide, a poisonous gas in car exhaust, being higher than the legal EU annual mean concentration. This list includes France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Britain.

The sooner we switch our transport fleet to electric, the better.  If terrorists were killing this many people, there would be action.  But dying from air pollution?  Meh.

Switching to EVs would also reduce carbon emissions, and it would reduce our reliance on tyrannical and murderous regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran, which we suck up to just because they produce oil. 

Why isn't rapidly transitioning the vehicle fleet to EVs a major objective of government policy in every developed country round the world?

Grenade

A cartoon from Cathy Wilcox.

Trump's Iran rank stupidity

A cartoon by Jim  Morin

Diplomacy with Trump

A cartoon by (of all people) Jim Carrey

Iran - US rapprochement

About time.

This article in The Age says that the Presidents of Iran and the US have spoken on the telephone in person for the first time since 1979.  Countries don't have to be "friends".  But they ought to try not to be enemies.  Of course, grumps on both sides will try to sabotage any rapprochement, but it makes so much sense for the two sides to make peace.

A step forward, at last.

By Patrick Chapatte of the Int Herald Tribune