It’s Sunday, July 10th, and I hope you are having a magnificent morning. Thanks again for your loyalty and your support; it makes a difference. Today’s supporter’s bonus roundup includes: a deeper-dive into Sri Lanka; a deeper-dive into sales of our strategic petroleum to China; and a list of Biden’s woes including his latest teleprompter accident.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 The unfortunate president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, resigned and fled the country in disgrace yesterday. Massed protestors invaded the presidential palace, set first to the prime minister’s residence, and overran the country’s central bank, generating fun video like scenes of overheated protestors cooling off and frolicking in the presidential swimming pool.

Sri Lanka is bankrupt. Inflation is topping +50%, with food prices up +80%. But it has a near-perfect “ESG”1 score of 98 — far greener and woker than the United States, which got an embarrassingly-low score of only 51. The point is, Sri Lanka has been all-in on the green agenda.

Perhaps the most significant example was when Sri Lanka banned chemical fertilizer in April last year. The government mandated that farmers adopt green “organic farming techniques,” because climate change. Experts were baffled when, within six months, rice output fell -20% and prices leapt +50%. Always a rice producer and exporter, Sri Lanka was forced to import $450M in rice last year. The price of carrots and tomatoes exploded even more destructively, by +500%.

President Rajapaksa declared an emergency in November, and soon thereafter lifted his chemical fertilizer ban, just in time for the start of the Ukraine war, when chemical fertilizer became dreadfully expensive and almost impossible for smaller countries like Sri Lanka to get.