Storm Helps British Airways Break Transatlantic Record

Storm Helps British Airways Break Transatlantic Record

It takes a conventional passenger airliner 6 hours and 13 minutes to fly from New York to London on average, according to flight-tracking website Flightradar24.

On Sunday morning, a British Airways Boeing 747 completed the journey in just four hours and 56 minutes, smashing the previous record for a conventional subsonic crossing of five hours and 13 minutes held by Norwegian since January 2018.

As Statista’s Niall McCarthy reports, the British Airways flight rode a jetstream powering Storm Ciara and it reached speeds of more than 800mph or 1,287km/h.

The plane touched down at Heathrow at 4:43 a.m., nearly two hours earlier than scheduled. The 747 was a minute faster than a Virgin Airbus A350 which landed minutes afterwards.

Even though it flew faster than the speed of sound (767 mph), it did not break the sound barrier as it was being propelled by the air around it. Other aircraft that have broken the sound barrier hold the speed-record between the two cities.

Infographic: Storm Helps British Airways Break Transatlantic Record | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

In February 1996, a British Airways Concorde completed the trip in 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds and that flight holds the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger aircraft.

The all-time record is still held by a United States Air Force Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

In 1974, Maj. James Sullivan and Maj. Noel Widdifield flew their aircraft from New York to Farnborough Airshow just outside London at 1,806 mph, completing the journey in an impressive 1 hour, 54 minutes and 56 seconds.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 02/11/2020 – 02:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HfqmKC Tyler Durden

Europe Can’t Afford A New “Green Deal”

Europe Can’t Afford A New “Green Deal”

Authored by Andrew Moran via The Mises Institute,

Today’s brand of the left-leaning politician is all about substituting what sounds good for what actually works. Modern politics, whether in the US or Europe, is about taking a chainsaw to everything that produced even a modicum of success to appease the deities espousing progressive orthodoxy. There is no better example of this than fossil fuels, an energy source that has lifted us out of destitution and darkness, and given us incredible wealth that the world had never witnessed. What is the Left interested in doing? Using confiscation, cronyism, centralization, and coercion to combat climate change. The European Union will achieve these objectives through the boondoggle-in the-making Green Deal (GD).

What is the Green Deal?

The European counterpart is a bit more realistic than the American version, aiming for net-zero emissions within thirty years rather than in a decade. But that is probably the best thing you can say about the proposal, which was approved by the European Parliament—though some policymakers had requested even greater ambitions to be inserted into the climate change scheme. Overall, the Green Deal is bad economics that will affect the already dreary conditions of Europe and exacerbate the slowdown.

The Green Deal begins with the European Commission examining every European Union law and regulation and then modifying it to align with the bloc’s new climate objectives. If you thought the EU’s regulations were already egregious, just you wait until March 2021, when the bureaucrats will submit a package containing all the statist goodies. At least Great Britain will not have to.

Policymakers want to implement a circular economy, one that emphasizes the sustainability factor in how the Continent produces goods. Its objective is to consume fewer materials and ensure that there is more concentration on reusing and recycling.

Like the Green New Deal (GND), the EU’s flagship program is to “at least double or even triple” the renovation rate of buildings. Today, this figure stands at about 1 percent, so bumping it up would require a concoction of interventions and mandates to ensure buildings are more efficient.

One provision is to introduce carbon tariffs for nations that refuse to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at a comparable rate to Europe. Another aspect that has cronyism written all over it is the Green Deal’s amplification of public-private partnerships to support research and innovation in technologies that lead to low-carbon steel generation, green batteries, and better nutrient management by farmers.

A common word used throughout the commission’s plan is “promotion.” Officials want to promote alternative sustainable fuels. They want to promote electric vehicle use. They aim to promote deforestation-free agricultural products. They desire to promote a reduction in air travel and more rail and water transportation of freight. Promotion is a kinder word for coercion.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen believes this is the region’s “moon moment”:

We do not have all the answers yet. Today is the start of a journey. This is Europe’s man on the moon moment. Our goal is to reconcile the economy with our planet and to make it work for our people.

Euros and Cents

So, how much will all this cost? Over in the US, the GND has a price tag of around $93 trillion. The GD is estimated to receive EU support funding of $100 billion. This is a steal until you realize that this is not the total cost that will be required to reach the EU’s objectives. It is essentially seed money to get things going, a so-called transition mechanism. The final tally will likely be a lot higher.

The other potential cost is the industries that could be impacted by this initiative. Analysts are sounding the alarm that established businesses would be seriously affected by the decarbonization push and the greater focus on renewable sources. An example of this would be coal.

Coal is indeed dying a slow death, with the primary assailant being the free market. However, coal’s demise is being accelerated by the state, even though it continues to be an important market in eastern Europe—in terms of consumption and production. Although coal has been gradually diminishing, it still employs tens of thousands of people, and the latest estimates say that as many as 160,000 people could be out of work within the next decade or so because of the EU.

And you have to think that this is also a jab at Russia. In the last few years, Russia has been supplying the rest of Europe with a lot of energy. Moscow’s dominance in the energy industry has been so immense that it is constructing more pipelines to gain a greater market share of Europe’s gas market. However, should the GD become the law of the land, the pipelines may be demolished or out of order, since they would no longer adhere to the standards of the climate strategy.

The greatest cost might be the lost economic growth.

“The Green Deal is the most fundamental shift in European energy policy we have seen in 20 years. Companies in the sector should not underestimate the disruption it will bring,” Nick Butler wrote in the Financial Times.

Clear, Simple, and Wrong

Every proposal to fight climate change and save the planet is based on the concentration of power and the aggressive expansion of regulatory implementation and enforcement. Policymakers refuse to allow the free market to create innovative solutions to environmental problems, effectively admitting that the planet is too important to leave up to the inhabitants. Only the government, and those it handpicks to receive the benefits of public spending, can be Mother Nature’s best friend. Unfortunately, this reckless abandon of innovation and industry, which is far too common in the region, will be another step toward Europe’s ruin. As H. L. Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” The EU knows this all too well.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 02/11/2020 – 02:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SyvSx8 Tyler Durden

The USA’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry Of Lies And Illusions

The USA’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry Of Lies And Illusions

Authored by Edward Curtin via Off-Guardian.org,

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

– Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?

This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives.

This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.

In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons.

Garrison said:

The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening.

All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated.
All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed.

The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted.

Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.

But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces.

These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R.

No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot-free.

That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.

SNOWDEN, ASSANGE, AND MANNING

If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail).

He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment.

He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.

Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced.

This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long.

Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamouring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It’s called news.

THE SLEEPWALKERS

But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct.

The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them. The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them. Indifference reigns.

Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.

That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say.

Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.

It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works.

The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda.

The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.

DENYING EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM

One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added.

Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain.

Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hairstyle, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people.

Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.

We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.

Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition” – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control.

To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past, a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets.

One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.

The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.

Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.

Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.

[Robert Kennedy assassin hospitalized after prison stabbing.]

RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.

SARTRE AND BAD FAITH

Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives.

People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi).

In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:

In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.

Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans.

For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem.

But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves.

We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.

The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain.

Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible.

But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip.

As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down.

This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit.

In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flashback their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up.

As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”

Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.

THE TWO-HEADED MONSTER

On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.

On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune.

Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death. There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.

Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line.

While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.

So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals.

The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.

JACQUES ELLUL ON PROPAGANDA

Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population.

He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty.

Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense.

He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:

The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even readymade opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.

Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda.

In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.

CULPABLE IGNORANCE

It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda.

Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition.

Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC.

And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.

In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.

But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.”

That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.

If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War.

To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.” He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.

Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.

Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps.

Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites?

The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.

The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.

The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population.

This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.

Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump.

The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy.

It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc.

The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth. It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point.

Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin-flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.

This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded.

While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.

How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters.

They both front for the empire.

In his excellent book, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov assiduously documents Obama’s crimes, including his CIA background.

As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable.

But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not.

Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.

Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard.

I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle.

If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.

The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.

Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.

Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.

Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”

If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 02/11/2020 – 00:05

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Meanwhile In Brazil… Scientists Discover ‘Puzzling’ Virus Of Unknown Origins Without Recognizable Genes

Meanwhile In Brazil… Scientists Discover ‘Puzzling’ Virus Of Unknown Origins Without Recognizable Genes

The findings of a new virus by Brazilian researchers have ‘puzzled’ the scientific community, consisting of unrecognizable genes, a new study revealed, published in bioRxiv.

The “mysterious” virus was discovered in amoebas in an artificial lake in Brazil has been considered the world’s smallest lifeforms, because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living creatures.

Researcher, Jônatas Abrahão, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, called the new virus “yaravirus,” a character from Brazilian mythology that means “mother of all waters.”

When Abrahão and his team sequenced the new virus genome, they discovered that 90% of the DNA sequence was from unknown origins.

Elodie Ghedin of New York University, who sequences viruses in sewage, said the finding of yaravirus isn’t surprising.

Ghedin said 95% of viruses in sewage have “no matches to reference genomes [in databases],” adding that, in Abrahão’s case, new viruses are found all the time.

Researchers were unclear about the impact of the new virus on human health. Future tests could include making those connections. The approach “is an important tool to learn the distribution of hundreds or thousands of viral genomes,” Abrahão said.

Curtis Suttle, an environmental virologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, said that some viruses that are found within humans keep us healthy, and others are essential for keeping ecosystems humming smoothly. “We could not survive without [them],” Suttle said. “There are enormous benefits to the discovery and characterization of viruses.”

The recent finding by Abrahão and his team shows just how much modern science lacks in their characterization of viruses found on Earth.

This is currently the case in Nigeria, where the government has warned about a “strange epidemic” of a mystery virus that has claimed the life of 15 people in less than one week.  

The outbreak of coronavirus in China and across the world has also shown just how underprepared governments and the scientific community are to emerging infectious diseases.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 23:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2wa77jn Tyler Durden

Here’s Why Airport Facial Recognition Is A Nightmare

Here’s Why Airport Facial Recognition Is A Nightmare

Authored by Edward Hasbrouk via PapersPlease.org,

The ACLU has released an important white paper on airport facial recognition by ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley. Citing some of our previous reporting and analysis, the ACLU white paper focuses, appropriately, not so much on the details of current use of facial recognition at airports, but on where governments and the aviation industry — who share a an explicitly-recognized interest in common use of facial recognition — say it will lead if we don’t stop them.

TSA Biometrics Roadmap, September 2018. Note that face ID will be used for all air travelers and that all use of physical ID credentials is “phasing out” in favor of facial recognition and digital tokens on mobile devices.

Driving the dystopian trend called out in the ACLU white paper is the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to use facial recognition and other techniques of compelled and automated identification for surveillance and control of travelers’ movements, and airlines, airports, and other businesses that want to share use of the same identification systems and data for business process automation and commercial tracking and profiling of travel customers.

Below are some key excerpts, but we encourage you to read the full ACLU white paper:

Customs and Border Protection’s new airport face recognition system has attracted a lot of attention and criticism, most recently last month when the agency backed away from suggestions that it would make the program mandatory for American citizens….

CBP officials argue that this program doesn’t involve mass surveillance. But CBP’s program still involves the mass collection of photographs of the general public….

The biggest harm from this program, however, is likely to come from the investment that it represents, the precedent it sets, and the path it puts us on as a society.

And where that path leads is a nightmare. It hardly takes a paranoid flight of fancy to foresee this program morphing into something far more comprehensive and dystopian — a world where face recognition is used throughout our public spaces to scrutinize our identity, record our movements, and create a world where everyone is constantly watched….

DHS and the aviation industry as a whole have a sweeping vision of expanded use of face recognition in the air travel context, and the government itself has already laid out — and begun following — a very specific, clear, and well-defined pathway for how the current program leads to a much broader implementations of face surveillance at the airport. And from there, it will be poised to expand far beyond the airport.

Here is what that pathway looks like:…

Once face recognition becomes entrenched at TSA checkpoints, there will be enormous pressure to turn those checkpoints into broader law enforcement checkpoints where people are subject to watchlist, criminal, and immigration checks. The TSA is not a law enforcement agency, and its checkpoints are not general law enforcement stops. The TSA’s authority to search people without a warrant is strictly confined to what is necessary to protect aircraft safety; TSA agents can’t conduct general criminal investigations when they find things suspicious….

CBP, however, does consider itself a law enforcement agency. The agency already partners with TSA in creating and applying flawed watch lists and algorithmic risk assessments of passengers based on biographical data (and secretive criteria), but CBP said in 2018 that it planned to also start running some passenger photos through the government’s IDENT biometric watchlist, which, according to DHS, includes “known or suspected terrorists, criminals, and immigration violators.” Among other things that raises the prospect that the TSA checkpoints will be turned into something new: a place where arrests of wanted people… routinely takes place….

Expanding government face recognition dovetails with airline face recognition… The airlines have a crucial role in the government’s face recognition vision. CBP is trying to create an infrastructure that the United States (unlike some other countries) has never had: border checkpoints for those exiting the country. But supporters of this system apparently don’t want it badly enough to actually pay for the government system they think we should have. Instead, they’re trying to do it on the cheap … by prodding the airlines to supply the equipment and manpower to actually run the system. And that, in turn, is implicitly based on CBP’s understanding that the airlines are embracing biometrics for their own purposes.

And the airlines are certainly interested in doing so. With over 2 million people a day flying domestically, these companies run what is essentially a giant factory for the movement of people, and are always looking for ways to improve their “industrial process.” Delta Airlines, for example, is already cooperating with CBP to experiment with face recognition for self-service check-in and bag check. Flyers presents themselves at the relevant kiosk where their photos are taken and sent to CBP’s cloud photo service. “CBP is excited at the possibility of biometric matching from curb to gate,” the agency proclaims in materials directed at its airline “partners.” “Airlines and airport authorities have an extraordinary opportunity to influence the future of secure air travel by co-developing processes that meet business, traveler and security needs.”

We’ve been down this road before. The TSA’s “Secure Flight” program, first implemented in 2009, forces passengers to hand over personal data to the airlines (their full name, gender, and date of birth) but lets the airlines do whatever they want with that information, providing a valuable data windfall for those companies. One question is whether we’ll see the same thing happen with traveler mug shots. CBP currently says the airlines won’t be permitted to keep the photographs those airlines take with their own equipment, but not that’s written in any law or regulation and it’s far from clear if and how that will be rigorously enforced….

Airport bag searches were new in American life when they were first introduced in response to a wave of hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, they have expanded throughout American life to many office buildings, schools, museums, sports stadiums, and even some gatherings in public spaces such as fireworks on the National Mall. Unfortunately there are too many reasons to think that face recognition, if it becomes accepted at airports, will follow this existing path toward the “airportization of American life.”

CBP’s TVS program is the first government face recognition checkpoint in American history. If America decides to allow its deployment to continue, where will things go from there? We don’t have to wonder because the government has already told us much of the story. This kind of mission creep is one reason why it is important to raise awareness over, ask sharp questions about, and ultimately oppose the CBP program

The ACLU has filed a new Freedom Of Information Act request for information about DHS facial recognition programs and aviation industry partnerships. This request overlaps with several of our pending overdue and unanswered FOIA requests to the DHS and DHS components, including those for agreements between the DHS, airlines, and airports for sharing facial images and DHS presentations on use of biometrics at events with aviation industry “partners”.  We look forward to the responses to the ACLU request.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 23:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2H90LTz Tyler Durden

Massive Auto Inventory Begins To Stockpile As Coronavirus Zaps An Already Anemic Chinese Car Market

Massive Auto Inventory Begins To Stockpile As Coronavirus Zaps An Already Anemic Chinese Car Market

Things couldn’t possibly be looking any worse for the Chinese auto industry.

Even before the coronavirus scare, the industry had already been mired in a steep recession that we have been covering at length for nearly the last two years. To make matters worse, that recession was predicted to continue for a third straight year, through 2020, with sales forecasted to fall yet again. And this was before the coronavirus…

Now, with the entire country locked down due to the coronavirus, things look as though they could be much worse for China’s auto industry. And that, in turn, could very easily pull down the auto industry globally.

Last month, inventory of unsold cars in China rose by 6.5%, according to Bloomberg. Average inventory levels were at 62.7% for January, according to the China Automobile Dealer Association. These numbers are far above the standard 50% level that is considered normal in the industry. 

And the forecast for the immediate future, let alone the rest of the year, looks pessimistic. Dealers are expecting sales in February to be less than half of those a year ago. In fact, Bloomberg notes that 70% of dealers polled by the CADA said they had seen “almost no customers” since the end of January. 

This follows China’s Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, saying in mid-January (prior to the coronavirus outbreak becoming severe) that the industry still faces “big downward pressure”.

At the time, he predicted sales of just 25 million units for the year. We obviously think that this number could wind up being materially lower. 

Recall, sales for 2019 totaled 25.769 million units. Sales of just 25 million units – an optimistic prediction in our eyes – would mark a third straight year of declines for the world’s largest auto market regardless.  

The MIIT also said at the time that it would further study and review its NEV vehicle subsidies. Recall, Beijing backing away from these subsidies caused NEV sales to taper off toward the end of 2019, sullying what was an otherwise consistent silver lining for the country, even amidst the overall recession in autos. 

With no signs of the country recovering from its ongoing epidemic, there doesn’t seem to be any silver linings left. 

We noted in December that NEV sales plunged 42% in November after Beijing backed away. The government is ostensibly dedicating all of its efforts to deal with the country’s ongoing outbreak, and so Beijing has not revisited its comments about EVs yet, and we are already halfway through Q1 2020. 

China did say, however, it is going to “maintain support” for NEVs, without getting into too much detail. Miao also said he’s confident that the country will ensure “stable industrial production in 2020” while phasing out “zombie firms”. 

There may have been some spooky foreshadowing in those words from mid-January, as almost every business in the locked down major cities of China now looks like a “zombie firm”. 

Wuhan has become a ghost town

As we noted several weeks ago, passenger car vehicle sales in China fell to end 2019, plunging 3.6% to 2.17 million units, according to the China Passenger Car Association. 

It marked the 18th drop in the past 19 months for the country. For the full year 2019, sales in China declined 7.5%, marking the country’s second straight annual decline. 

 


Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 23:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2tQ9GGq Tyler Durden

‘Puppet Pete’ Says Revolution And The Status Quo Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

‘Puppet Pete’ Says Revolution And The Status Quo Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The world’s first laboratory-grown presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg met with boos and chants of “Wall Street Pete” at a recent Democratic Party event in New Hampshire for taking a dig at the revolution-minded rhetoric favored by Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

“We cannot risk dividing Americans’ future further, saying that you must either be for a revolution or you must be for the status quo,” Buttigieg said.

“Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.”

This is a talking point that the tightly scripted and focus group-tested Buttigieg has been repeatedly regurgitating all month, so it’s worth taking a look at.

Claiming that it isn’t necessary to choose between revolution and the status quo is claiming that you can change the status quo without any kind of revolution. You are saying that the establishment which has created and reinforced the status quo can now suddenly, for some strange and mysterious reason, be counted upon to change it. That the status quo will change the status quo.

Anyone who has paid attention to US politics for more than a few years already knows that this is objectively false. From administration to administration, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or who controls the House or the Senate, the status quo has been adamantly enforced along a rigid trajectory toward ever-increasing military expansionism, exploitative neoliberal economic policies, income and wealth inequality, police militarization, mass-scale imprisonment, Orwellian surveillance programs and increasing restrictions on journalism and free speech.

Change is not going to come from those institutions, it’s going to come from the people using the power of their numbers to force important changes that those institutions do not want to make. And Pete Buttigieg knows this. And so do the spooks and oligarchs who are backing him.

It is very appropriate that a military intelligence officer with ties to the CIA, who is beloved by intelligence/defense agency insiders and who appears to have been groomed by national security mandarins from the very beginning of his career, should be actively working to kill a revolutionary zeitgeist. After all, backing counter-revolutionaries is a favorite CIA activity.

Progressives already got suckered into forfeiting their revolutionary spirit in exchange for flowery prose and empty rhetoric the last time they elected Pete Buttigieg for president, back when Pete Buttigieg was named Barack Obama. It was literally the exact same script they’re trying to recycle with Puppet Pete: a plucky young underdog with a knack for sparkly verbiage overcomes the frontrunner in Iowa in a stunning upset, then rides the momentum from that initial victory on to the Democratic nomination.

And now we’re seeing the Democratic Party officially award Buttigieg the largest delegate count in Iowa, after a massive scandal and despite countless unresolved discrepancies in the numbers, and establishment narrative managers are now preparing their heartwarming David-and-Goliath stories about the small town mayor knocking out the big bad socialist frontrunner for a second consecutive time in New Hampshire in defiance of the odds and polling expectations. If that falls through they’ve got Nevada, where shit really started to get crazy in 2016, and where they’re preparing to implement a brand new caucus app which they keep trying to say is not an app but a “tool” made for iPads (which is the thing that an app is).

All this to install a man who has managed to pack an astonishing amount of corruption and scandal into a relatively brief, small-scale political career.

That’s what not choosing between revolution and the status quo looks like. It looks like continuing the status quo.

Which is why it’s so dumb when Buttigieg says “Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.” Movement? What movement? You don’t get to call it a “movement” when its entire agenda is to prevent any movement. Use a different word. “Let’s make room for everybody in this inertia,” or “Let’s make room for everybody in this stasis” or something.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m interested in this presidential election not because I am under the delusion that presidential elections tend to change things, but because the attempts to manipulate it, and the public’s response to those manipulations, could shake something loose that actually might. If enough people in the world’s most powerful nation wake up to the fact that they don’t have the kind of political system they were taught about in school, if they realize that everything they’ve been told about how their government operates is a lie, if they realize their lives have been made so unnecessarily difficult by a ruling oligarchic class with a vested interest in keeping them impoverished and distracted, well, then we’re looking at an actual transformative force.

Then we’re looking at the possibility of a real revolution. Not a violent revolution; those always result in a continuation of the same ills under a different system, and there’s nothing revolutionary about that.

I’m talking about a real revolution. One where people begin to open their eyes to the reality that their entire understanding of what’s going on in the world has been the result of mass psychological manipulation throughout their entire lives at the hands of the school system, the billionaire-controlled news media, and the political establishment. One where people open their eyes so wide to the power of narrative control that they become impossible to propagandize. One where people begin weaving their own narratives. Their own understandings of the world. Built not for the benefit of the powerful, but for the benefit of the people.

We’re seeing a lot of movement already in 2020, and it’s just getting started. I see the potential for a lot of light to reach a lot of new areas between the cracks which open up in that movement. And I see the guardians of the status quo having a harder and harder time maintaining the state of stasis. Their increasingly ham-fisted manipulations, such as installing a jarringly phony puppet like Pete Buttigieg, say a lot about their desperation.

Find ways of forcing them to overextend themselves and overplay their hand. Let’s show everyone what they’re hiding behind the puppet theater.

*  *  *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either YoutubesoundcloudApple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypalpurchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 22:45

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“We’re Definitely Not Prepared” – African Healthcare Officials Fear Virus Spread

“We’re Definitely Not Prepared” – African Healthcare Officials Fear Virus Spread

While the African continent continues to battle plagues of locust and food shortages, an even bigger worry is looming on the horizon, that some of the Chinese workers have carried the virus to Ethiopia or the African countries they work in, and will those countries be able to contain it while they can, while the numbers are small?

The virus that has spread through much of China has yet to be confirmed in Africa, but global health authorities are increasingly worried about the threat to the continent where an estimated 1 million Chinese now live, as some health workers on the ground warn they are not ready to handle an outbreak.

As we detailed previously, if travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia.  Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day.  Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.

Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.

Unfortunately, as AP reports, it does not appear so… at least yet. Countries are racing to take precautions as hundreds of travelers arrive from China every day. Safeguards include stronger surveillance at ports of entry and improved quarantine and testing measures across Africa, home to 1.2 billion people and some of the world’s weakest systems for detecting and treating disease.

But the effort has been complicated by a critical shortage of testing kits and numerous illnesses that display symptoms similar to the flu-like virus.

“The problem is, even if it’s mild, it can paralyze the whole community,” said Dr. Michel Yao, emergency operations manager in Africa for the World Health Organization.

Those growing worried include employees at the Sino-Zambia Friendship Hospital in the mining city of Kitwe in northern Zambia, near the Congo border. Chinese companies operate mines on the outskirts of the city of more than half a million people. One company is headquartered in Wuhan, the city at the center of the virus outbreak. Hundreds of workers traveled between Zambia and China in recent weeks.

“We’re definitely not prepared. If we had a couple of cases, it would spread very quickly,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said.

“We’re doing the best we can with what resources we have.”

The Sino-Zambia Friendship Hospital, or Sinozam, a low-slung facility near the city’s train station, has taken some precautions, including checking patient temperatures with infrared thermometers and establishing isolation areas.

Without testing, officials are “just relying on the symptoms” and whether they persist.

“But from what we are learning right now, some people show hardly any symptoms at all,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said, calling that the hospital’s biggest worry.

Chinese embassies in Zambia and elsewhere in Africa have been unusually outspoken, giving news conferences and television interviews to discuss their response to the outbreak. Embassies require arriving Chinese citizens to declare where they have been in China. They also urge citizens to voluntarily isolate themselves for 14 days.

“We are now practicing hygiene, even in the mines,” said the Kitwe-based president of the Mine Workers Union of Zambia, Joseph Chewe.

“Any report of a person with coronavirus here will be very disastrous.”

The WHO says countries are obligated to inform it of any confirmed cases and are requested to report suspected cases as well. The WHO chief has publicly urged countries to share information. So far, African countries appear to be complying, a WHO adviser on health security, Dr. Ambrose Talisuna, told reporters.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 22:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SApYLW Tyler Durden

South Korean TV Show Reunites Mother With Dead Daughter Via Virtual Reality

South Korean TV Show Reunites Mother With Dead Daughter Via Virtual Reality

Authored by Paul Jospeh Watson via Summit News,

A TV show in South Korea reunited a mother with her deceased 7-year-old daughter via a virtual reality recreation in what some observers thought was a dystopian and exploitative move.

A clip from the show Meeting You features the mother, wearing a VR headset and touch-sensitive gloves, walking around a green screen set and interacting with a 3D representation of her daughter.

The two are able to engage in a limited form of conversation as the mother caresses the representation of her daughter while crying.

The situation is similar in some ways to a plot from the popular dystopian TV series Black Mirror.

In an episode entitled Be Right Back, a young woman’s boyfriend is killed in a car accident and she decides to replace him with an android clone by having her boyfriend’s AI personality downloaded into the robot’s body.

While this woman’s VR interaction with a graphical representation of her dead daughter is a long way off that, it’s almost as creepy.

As Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett points out, no one would have an issue with it if the interaction helped the mother get over her grief, but the fact that the whole thing is being broadcast for the consumption of TV viewers makes it somewhat suspect.

“Having some code pretend to be a living thing that she loved might only add to the trauma. Only time, and research, will tell,” comments Plunkett, adding, “Whatever the long-term moral and ethical questions are that we’re going to have to face, this is extremely fucked up.”

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 22:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39gUfWO Tyler Durden

China’s Smartphone Sales And Production To Crater Amid Supply Chain Shock

China’s Smartphone Sales And Production To Crater Amid Supply Chain Shock

One major threat to the recovery in global growth this year is the coronavirus outbreak that is centered around Greater China.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has now labeled the deadly virus a global health emergency as more than 902 people have died, surpassing all of SARS (813) in just three weeks.

Global confirmed cases hit 40,544 in China and 382 offshore on Sunday. The WHO Director-General warned: “we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the outbreak.

The virus poses a significant economic risk to the Chinese economy amid 400 million people quarantined, dozens of cities on lockdown, shuttered manufacturing hubs, and a collapse in retail and tourism. We’ve also noted that complex supply chains in and out of China have been severed, which will lead to an economic shock felt around the world in the coming weeks and or months.

One significant disruption that is becoming all too obvious at the moment, which Qualcomm warned last week, is that coronavirus has disrupted the smartphone industry.

A new report, according to Reuters, details China’s smartphone sales could plunge upwards of 50% in 1Q, as retail phone stores and production of semiconductors/smartphones remain closed.

“Vendors’ planned product launches will be canceled or delayed, given that large public events are not allowed in China,” research firm Canalys said in a note.

“It will take time for vendors to change their product launch roadmaps in China, which is likely to dampen 5G shipments.”

While Canalys expects China’s smartphone shipments to halve this quarter, International Data Corporation (IDC) expects shipments to drop by about 30% for the period.

TrendForce Corp. said Apple could see a 10% decline in iPhone sales in 1Q, from 45.5 million to about 41 million units.

TrendForce slashed its 1Q global smartphone production forecast -12% Y/Y, due to factory closings across Greater China. It warned global smartphone production in 1Q would be around 275 million units, a 5-year low in production.

We’ve noted, in the last several weeks, that if factories cannot resume production early this week and have full production by the end of the month, shortages would develop and hit the largest brands in the world, such as Apple iPhone and AirPods.

The one sector with the most exposure to Greater China and Asia Pacific is also the sector that has outperformed the most in recent months: Tech.

Ample Fed liquidity has made Wall Street blind as a bat when it comes to recognizing the unraveling of complex supply chains in Asia, and the slowdown in global growth.

The V-shape recovery in global growth could be more like a U-shape or continuation to the downside for 1H20 – as it appears, coronavirus will stick around for the immediate future.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 02/10/2020 – 21:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Hb0CPn Tyler Durden