After a record-breaking heat wave turns parts of Europe into an inferno, cooler air is finally on the way, as European leaders have renewed discussions on combating the impacts of climate change on their economies, reported Reuters.
The south of France, more specifically Gallargues-le-Montueux, recorded 114.6°F on Saturday, more than four degrees above all-time highs
Severe heat warnings were lifted over France on Sunday, after nearly a week of sizzling tempatures. Italy, Spain, and other Central European nations experienced days of unbearable heat, as well.
Tempatures started to decline on Sunday for France and Spain, but Germany still printed above 100°F before cooling down on Monday.
Wildfires broke out across Spain during the heat wave were stabilized on Saturday. Firefighters struggled for days to control a blaze in the central provinces of Toledo and Madrid that had burned eight sq miles since Friday.
Wildfires force residents to evacuate in Cadalso de los Vidrios as the flames coming from a previous wildfire in Toledo crosses to Spain’s Madrid region pic.twitter.com/KiZmubVd8I
Jerome Despey owns a vineyard in France’s southwestern Herault region, he tweeted images of dried grapes, and said his crop experienced “widespread damage.”
“Some vines seem to have been hit with a blowtorch,” Despey said, while Catherine Bernard likened it to the effects of a hairdryer.
Échaudage le vignoble héraultais est impacté par la canicule surtout les Carignan une pensée pour ceux qui vont être encore en difficulté pic.twitter.com/RydRynI23c
“I’ve been a winegrower for 30 years. I have never seen a vine burnt by a sudden onset of heat like yesterday,” Despey added.
The cause of the heat wave appears to be the weakening of the high-level jet stream has caused weather systems to stall out in Central Europe. Reuters notes that Europe’s hottest summers in the last 500 years have occurred during the past 100 years.
The World Meteorological Organization said that the heat wave was “absolutely consistent” with more volatile weather linked to the result of greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the Guardian, Météo-France meteorologist Etienne Kapikian, said “this is historic. It’s the first time temperature in excess of 114°F has ever been recorded in France.”
France is the seventh European country in the union to ever record 114 F tempatures, along with Bulgaria, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, and North Macedonia, Meteo France said.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IYFLAC Tyler Durden
In Illinois, Lakewood Forest Preserves District President Angelo Kyle attempted to cancel this year’s 27th annual Civil War re-enactment, which is scheduled for July. He rescinded the cancellation after other Lake County commissioners complained, and the organizer noted that they already have a contract. But Kyle says he doesn’t want to host the event in the future. It is the largest event hosted by the park, drawing about 3,000 people each year, a fact that seems to grate on Kyle. “Why isn’t (the largest event) pertaining to the mission of the forest preserve—preserving our natural resources and environmental quality of Lake County?” he said.
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This new report from the United Nations documents Statista’s headline, and it proves that America’s regime-change operations have actually created around half of the world’s refugees. It proves that America’s penchant for invading and trying to overthrow the governments that its billionaires want to replace (“regime-change”) has been by far the biggest of all single causes of refugees worldwide, vastly higher than any other government. Regardless of how bad those other governments might possibly be, the US regime is far worse – at least as being the cause, the creator, of the world’s refugee problems.
Consider the countries that the US regime has recently regime-changed or attempted to:
The US regime invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Syria in 2012-2019, and has been applying, in order to overthrow the Government of Venezuela, strangulating economic sanctions. All of those four target-countries (Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, and Afghanistan) lead the list of nations that are bleeding the most refugees. The US regime’s “regime-change” operations abroad are therefore certainly the leading cause of the world’s refugee-crisis.
That’s the big news in the new UN report, though it is news that the report itself ignores.
The biggest of these crises in 2018 were Syria and Venezuela, which were the US regime’s most recent regime-change operations. But Afghanistan and Iraq are also among the top bleeders of refugees — even now, over 15 years after the US regime had invaded them.
Mr De Zayas, a former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and an expert in international law, spoke to The Independent following the presentation of his Venezuela report to the HRC in September. He said that since its presentation the report has been ignored by the UN and has not sparked the public debate he believes it deserves. “Sanctions kill,” he told The Independent, adding that they fall most heavily on the poorest people in society, demonstrably cause death through food and medicine shortages, lead to violations of human rights and are aimed at coercing economic change.
In order for the US regime to blame Venezuela’s Government 100% for Venezuela’s problems including the economic shortages that result from the US regime’s sanctions, the US regime stages attempts to send aid to the Venezuelan people, and this aid is, of course, blocked by Venezuela’s Government, because it is just the aggressor’s PR stunt — the US regime’s effort to take over the country in a ‘kind’ way. (After all, Hitler claimed to love the “Volk,” even as he served the interests of Germany’s armaments-firms and the billionaires who controlled them.) However, if the aggressor had honestly wanted to help Venezuelans, it wouldn’t be applying such strangulating economic sanctions, which include penalties against countries that trade with Venezuela — an economic blockade against Venezuela.
Here are highlights in the new report from the UN:
The report says that in 2018, there were “13.6 million newly displaced” persons.
“Altogether, more than two thirds (67 per cent) of all refugees worldwide came from just five countries:”
Syria 6.7M
Afghanistan 2.7M
Sudan 2.3M
Myanmar 1.1M
Somalia 0.9M
“The main countries of asylum for refugees were:”
Turkey 3.7M
Pakistan 1.4M
Uganda 1.2M
Sudan 1.1M
Germany 1.1M
However, this chaotic UN report also states that:
At the end of 2018, Syrians continued to be the largest forcibly displaced population, with 13.0 million people living in displacement. … Colombians were the second largest group, with 8.0 million forcibly displaced, most of them (98 per cent) inside their country at the end of 2018.
Presumably, the reason why Colombia does’t show on the list of “newly displaced” is that most of its “8.0 million forcibly displaced” occurred during the civil war there, which peaked in 2009.
“Figure 17 | Major recipient countries of new asylum applications | 2017-2018” shows that pending asylum-applications are the highest in US, second-highest is in Peru (mainly from Venezuela resulting from America’s economic sanctions against Venezuela), third-highest is in Germany (mainly from Arabic lands that America invaded), fourth-highest is in France (mainly from Arabic lands that America invaded), and fifth-highest is in Turkey (mainly from Arabic lands that America invaded).
In other words: four of those five countries are lands where America’s strangulating economic sanctions, and invasions, by America’s own troops and by its proxy-forces such as Al Qaeda and other ‘rebels’, drove millions of people out. Though the confusing report doesn’t note it, most of that “highest in US” asylum-applications come from the US regime’s banana republics — Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — where the US trained death squads etc. created (or at least encouraged) the problems, at least a decade or more ago. Consequently, even in some nations where the US regime didn’t create refugees by means of invasions, it created many by coups and other means.
“Figure 18 | Major source countries of new asylum-seekers | 2017-2018” shows that in 2018, the highest number of new asylum-applicants were from Venezuela, second-highest were from Afghanistan, third-highest were from Syria, and fourth-highest were from Iraq. All of those are lands that suffer from the US regime’s past and current aggressions. (Of course, everybody expects Iran to be the next.)
Venezuelan refugees and asylum-seekers grew in number during 2018. The broader movement of Venezuelans through the region and beyond, increasingly took on the characteristics of a refugee situation, with some 3.4 million living outside Venezuela by the end of 2018, as more than 3 million Venezuelans left their homes, travelling mainly elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. “This is the biggest exodus in the region’s recent history, and one of the biggest displacement crises in the world.” It could turn out to be even worse than Colombia’s was. The report notes:
“When my nine-month-old daughter died because of the lack of medicines, doctors or treatment, I decided to take my family out of Venezuela before another one of my children died. Diseases were getting stronger than us. I told myself, either we leave or we die.” – Eulirio Baes, a 33-year-old indigenous Warao from Delta Amacuro in Venezuela. He abandoned the Warao’s ancestral lands and took his entire family to Brazil after three relatives died.
Lebanon continued to host the largest number of refugees relative to its national population. 1 in 6 people there was a refugee. Jordan (1 in 14) and Turkey (1 in 22) ranked second and third, respectively. Of course, those lands receive mainly Syrian refugees.
At the end of 2018, Syrians continued to be the largest forcibly displaced population, with 13.0 million people living in displacement, including 6,654,000 refugees, 6,184,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) and 140,000 asylum-seekers. Colombians were the second largest group, with 8.0 million forcibly displaced, most of them (98 per cent) still living inside their country at the end of 2018. The top two foreign recipients of refugees from Colombia were Spain and Ecuador. As previously noted, Colombia’s refugees were generated by the lengthy civil war there, which peaked in 2009. The following visual, which is the most comprehensible part of this chaotic (and in places uninterpretable) UN report, doesn’t show Colombia, because these were the refugee-flows only for the year of 2018:
That visual is around half of the interpretable content in the entire 28-page UN report. It’s a visual way of showing that the US regime’s regime-change operations produce around half of the entire world’s refugee-problem. The only US Presidential candidate who even so much as just mentions America’s “regime-change wars” (and she is strongly against them) is Tulsi Gabbard, and she currently scores the support of fewer than 1% of America’s Democrats in that Party’s Presidential primary polls. So, at least America’s Democrats are overwhelmingly unconcerned about their country’s causing around half of the entire world’s refugee crisis. And there is no indication that America’s Republican voters are more concerned about it than the Democratic voters are. Americans, evidently, don’t care about this matter. At least, not yet.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3093DHB Tyler Durden
Next month, the world’s first floating nuclear power unit (FPU) dubbed ‘Academik Lomonosov’ will be towed via the Northern Sea Route to its final destination in the Far East, after almost two decades in construction.
Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant has two KLT-40S reactor units that collectively generate 70 MW of energy.
A year ago we noted video of the beginning of the ships’ voyage (from St.Petersburg to Murmansk)
A floating nuclear power plant made by Russia headed out for its first sea voyage on Saturday. The floating plant, the academic lomonosov will provide power for a port town and for oil rigs. pic.twitter.com/Eo0uBjVfht
The vessel is now expected to be towed “along the Northern Sea Route to the work site, unloaded at the mooring berth, and connected to the coastal infrastructure in Pevek,” added the press release.
Pevek is a small Arctic port town and the governmental center of Chaunsky District in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Russia, located on Chaunskaya Bay.
Once the floating nuclear power plant is moored and connected to the coastal infrastructure in Pevek, the nuclear reactors aboard will be used to power 100,000 homes in the region, a desalination plant, and critical energy infrastructure assets. Rosatom said the floating power plant “will replace the Bilibino nuclear power plant and Chaunskaya TPP that are technologically outdated,” and become the most northerly nuclear facility in the world.
However, the floating nuclear power plant has been extensively criticized by antipollutionist — Greenpeace has called it a “floating Chernobyl.”
“Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment, which is already under enormous pressure from climate change,” Greenpeace nuclear expert Jan Haverkamp said in a statement.
“The floating nuclear power plants will typically be put to use near coastlines and shallow water … contrary to claims regarding safety, the flat-bottomed hull and the floating nuclear power plant’s lack of self-propulsion makes it particularly vulnerable to tsunamis and cyclones.”
Meanwhile, Rosatom states the vessel meets all requirements from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and “does not pose any threat to the environment.”
“The FNPP is designed with the great margin of safety that exceeds all possible threats and makes nuclear reactors invincible for tsunamis and other natural disasters. In addition, the nuclear processes at the floating power unit meet all requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and do not pose any threat to the environment.”
Why would Russia want a floating power plant in the Arctic?
Speaking to reporters in 2017 after a conference with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russia’s proposal to jointly explore the Northern Sea Route was “a great idea,” and that “China welcomes this idea and supports efforts with partners in the region to develop a ‘Silk Road on ice’.”
The Answer: To provide the needed energy to build infrastructure for the ‘Ice Silk Road.’
As CNN concludes, the last Russian nuclear project of a comparable scale was completed in 2007, when the “50 Years of Victory” nuclear-powered icebreaker finally sailed after sitting in the docks since 1989. Now, after more than 20 years of arguments, changes of contractors and economic crises, Russian engineers can finally take pride in launching the world’s only nuclear floating rig.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FGEVqc Tyler Durden
“Christianity originated in the Middle East. Thus, the displacement or evacuation of Christians from the Middle East is very dangerous for the safety of the region… also in the Mediterranean Sea region. Europe is affected by this.” — Egyptian Coptic Pope Tawadros II, in Germany, where he was inaugurating a new Coptic church for his exiled community. Deutsche Welle, May 14, 2019.
Regrettably, the tragedy of these Christian massacres is directly proportional to the neglect with which they are reported in the West.
“‘Islamophobia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christophobia’ is almost nonexistent”. — Ross Douthat, “Are Christians Privileged or Persecuted?”, The New York Times, April 23, 2019.
Algeria — the country of origin of some of the Christian fathers such as Augustine of Hippo — has become a country… where officially there are “no native Christians”. How many other countries will meet the same fate? And will the West ever come to the help of their Christian brethren?
Persecution of Christians in the Middle East is now close to “genocide“, a UK-commissioned report just revealed. The same threat has also become critical for Christian communities in Africa.
Some say it began in Algeria in the 1990s, when 19 monks, bishops, nuns and other Catholics were killed during the civil war. Since then, in Nigeria, Christian faithful have been massacred in their churches; in Kenya, Christians have been killed in universities; in Libya, Christians have been beheaded on beaches; in Yemen, nuns have been assassinated and in Egypt, massive anti-Christian violence is prompting an exodus. It is the new African archipelago of persecution.
Distressingly, these Christians have been finding themselves in the blind spot of the West: they are “too Christian” to get the Left’s attention, but too far away for the Right. Africa’s Christians are orphans. They have no “allies”, John O’Sullivan writes.
Christian families recently fled the city of Diffa, in Niger, after Boko Haram delivered the message: “You have three days to go or you will be killed!”. “There is no Christian anymore in this town”, someone reported to the non-governmental organization, the Barnabas Fund. The town, Arbinda, is in Burkina Faso. Numbers are telling: 82 pastors, 1,145 Christians and 151 households have fled from violence in the Muslim-majority nation. Just in the last few weeks, several of the Christian faithful and clergy have been murdered. Jihadists killed six Christians in a Catholic church in the town of Dablo. A pastor was murdered in an attack in Silgadji, Catholic parades have been targeted.
Pictured: The gate of a school in Diffa. (Image source: Roland Hunziker/Wikimedia Commons)
Jihadists apparently want to “cleanse” these areas of Christians — and they are succeeding. “There is an atmosphere of panic in the town,” the mayor of Dablo, Ousmane Zongo, said. “People are holed up in their homes, nothing is going on. The shops and stores are closed. It’s practically a ghost town”.
In Nigeria, attacks on Christians never stop. The country has become a “war zone for Christians“.
“The attacks on Christians are growing more flagrant and more aggressive,” Father John Bakeni from the Maiduguri Diocese, northern Nigeria, said. “We consider each day we live in safety a blessing because we do not know what will happen the next day”.
“We Christians are at risk of extinction and an attempt is being made to Islamize the whole country because controlling Nigeria means expelling Christians from all of West Africa”, said Father Joseph Fidelis Bature, a Catholic priest in the Nigerian diocese of Maiduguri, in the Italian monthly Tempi.
Unfortunately, we Westerners have a short memory. Al Qaeda’s first attacks took place in Africa: the bombings against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Africa matters for the West. That is why we should take this monstrous new anti-Christian persecution more seriously. “Christianity originated in the Middle East”, the Egyptian Coptic Pope Tawadros II said in Germany, where he was inaugurating a new Coptic church in May for his exiled community. “Thus, the displacement or evacuation of Christians from the Middle East is very dangerous for the safety of the region, not only in the Middle East but also in the Mediterranean Sea region. Europe is affected by this, and the Arab countries as well”. The West should take much more seriously these appeals from the Eastern Christian leaders.
With a secularized Europe and a Middle East close to becoming emptied of Christians, those jihadists who are obsessed with eradicating Christianity understand that their current ideological battlefield is in Africa. “By 2025, 50 percent of the (world’s) Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America”, wrote the scholar Philip Jenkins. The share of the world’s Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is expected grow from 24% in 2010 to 38% by 2050. That is why jihadists there are pursuing a horrific project of religious cleansing.
“Christianity has literally ‘gone south’, exploding demographically in the developing world and augmenting ongoing sociopolitical turmoil in places such as West Africa”, the Pew Forum reports. Radical Islam wants to stop this demographic movement, which Professor Philip Jenkins called “the largest religious change of any kind that has ever occurred”.
According to another report, in one century the number of Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than 20-fold, rising from 11 million in 1900 to 234 million in 2010. At the same time, the number of Christians has grown 70-fold, rising from 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to 21% of all the Christians in the world and 15% of the world’s Muslims. “Islamic extremism has two global centers of gravity, one in the Arab Middle East, but the other is in sub-Saharan Africa”, researcher Ron Boyd-MacMillan noted in a report for Open Doors.
Every year, Open Doors lists the world’s 50 worst persecutors of Christians. The list include 14 African countries, called home to “extreme” or “very high” levels of persecution: Algeria, the Central African Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia. Mali, for instance, went from no listing to seventh place in just two years. In Kenya last year, Islamists forced passengers of a bus to present their identification cards. Then they separated Muslims and killed the two Christians.
Regrettably, the tragedy of these massacres of Christians is directly proportional to the neglect with which they are reported in the West. “One of the basic facts of contemporary religious history is that Christians around the world are persecuted on an extraordinary scale”, Ross Douthat recently wrote in The New York Times.
“Yet as an era-defining reality rather than an episodic phenomenon this reality is barely visible in the Western media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by Western governments and humanitarian institutions. (‘Islamophobia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christophobia’ is almost nonexistent.)”
Jihadists know a secret: persecution works.Algeria — the country of origin of some of the Christian fathers such as Augustine of Hippo — has become a country that is 99.9% Muslim and where officially there are “no native Christians“. How many other countries will meet the same fate? And will the West ever come to the help of their Christian brethren?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NDUx4f Tyler Durden
However, now that they are in control, they are fighting bitterly amongst one-another. They are on two sides.
Concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Republican Party billionaires hate especially Iran, and especially all progressivism.
By contrast, concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Democratic Party billionaires hate especially Russia, and accept some progressivism.
(They need to do the latter so that they can be considered to be liberals and thus tolerated or even admired by Democratic Party voters. That’s necessary for them because, for example, Democratic Party voters would be just as turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the conservative Koch brothers, as Republican Party voters would be turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the liberal George Soros — and everybody knows that billionaires fund the major politicians; it’s not a totally hidden fact. Soros and other liberal billionaires can claim to be ‘public spirited’, which is necessary for them in order to be able to appeal to liberals; but the Koch brothers and other avowedly conservative billionaires have no need to make that pretense in order to appeal to conservatives.)
Actually, all billionaires are conservatives, because they need to be that, in order to call a country like America “democratic” instead of “dictatorial,” and they need that myth of American ‘democracy’ in order to prevent a revolution, which would strip them of their power.
(No American billionaire calls America a “dictatorship,” even though it is and each of them knows it, since they collectively are the dictators here, and since they don’t become involved in politics, at all, unless they want to remain in control over it. The richer a person is, the more conservative the person tends to be, and billionaires are the richest people of all, so all of them are actually conservatives. Even billionaire liberals are conservative, because otherwise the individual would be fomenting revolution, and none of them is doing any such thing — what would they be revolting against, if not themselves? They can pretend to be progressive, but only pretend. Furthermore, every study shows that the richer a person is, the more involved in politics the person tends to be. Poor people are the least involved in politics, and this is one of the reasons why the U.S. is a dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship by the richest, and throughout thousands of years that has been called an “aristocracy,” as opposed to a “democracy.”)
Barack Obama was, from the very first moment when he became President, aiming to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, and the reason for that was never made clear, but some people thought it was because Syria is allied with Iran, and some of them thought that it was instead because Syria is allied with Russia. When the Democrat Obama negotiated and signed the multinational pact in which Iran guaranteed that it would produce no nuclear bombs and the U.S. and its allies would end their sanctions against Iran, the reality became clear that Obama didn’t actually hate Iran (which the Republican Trump clearly does). Obama was invading Syria because it’s allied with Russia, not because it’s allied with Iran. His successor, the Republican Donald Trump, is just as anti-Iran as Obama was anti-Russia. Whereas the Republican Party especially hate Iran, the Democratic Party especially hate Russia. And that’s because their billionaires do — the Democratic ones hate Russia the most, and the Republican ones hate Iran the most. That’s the biggest single difference between the two Parties.
The main personal difference between Obama and Trump (other than that Obama was intelligent and Trump isn’t) is that Obama was a much more skilled liar than Trump is. For example, he was able to string Vladimir Putin along until 2012 to hope that Obama’s ‘reset with Russia’ wasn’t merely a ploy. On 26 March 2012, Obama informed Dmitry Medvedev to tell Putin that “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Obama won Ukraine as being an enemy of Russia; it’s as if Putin had wrangled a coup in Mexico and suddenly Mexicans turned rabidly hostile toward the U.S. But it was a Democrat who did this, not a Republican. And the Republican Trump is just as hostile to Iran as Obama was to Russia. These aren’t foreign governments that are interfering in America’s foreign policies; maybe Israel is doing that, and maybe Saudi Arabia is, and maybe UAE is, but certainly America’s 585 billionaires are. And they are allied with those three Middle Eastern countries. When America imposes sanctions against a country in order to wreck the target-nation’s economy, that target-nation is officially an ‘enemy’, and that’s because it is allied with or at least friendly toward either Russia, or Iran, or both. America’s 585 billionaires control America’s foreign policies, but disagree on whether America’s top enemy is (if the billionaire is a Republican) Iran, or (if the billionaire is a Democrat) Russia.
For example: If the next President is Biden, then conquering Russia will be the main foreign-policy goal, but if the next President is Trump, then conquering Iran will be.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and LGBTQ people across the world are gearing up for a weekend of celebrations to remember the event that kickstarted the gay rights revolution. However, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, while a lot has been achieved over the past half a century in the United States, there is still more work to do.
The same cannot be said of other countries, many of which are waiting for their own Stonewall moment.
The following infographic was made with EQUALDEX data and it shows where homosexuality remains illegal.
In 2019, homosexuality is still punishable by death in at least ten countries and it remains illegal in countless others.
Brunei recently provoked international outrage when it introduced strict Islamic laws in April that made homosexual activity punishable by stoning to death.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NliTPV Tyler Durden
70 years ago, the British writer George Orwell captured the essence of technology in its ability to shape our destinies in his seminal work, 1984. The tragedy of our times is that we have failed to heed his warning.
No matter how many times I read 1984, the feeling of total helplessness and despair that weaves itself throughout Orwell’s masterpiece never fails to take me by surprise. Although usually referred to as a ‘dystopian futuristic novel’, it is actually a horror story on a scale far greater than anything that has emerged from the minds of prolific writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. The reason is simple. The nightmare world that the protagonist Winston Smith inhabits, a place called Oceania, is all too easily imaginable. Man, as opposed to some imaginary clown or demon, is the evil monster.
In the very first pages of the book, Orwell demonstrates an uncanny ability to foresee future trends in technology. Describing the protagonist Winston Smith’s frugal London flat, he mentions an instrument called a ‘telescreen’, which sounds strikingly similar to the handheld ‘smartphone’ that is enthusiastically used by billions of people around the world today.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows” #orwell #1984 pic.twitter.com/UxisBmL9lZ
Orwell describes the ubiquitous device as an “oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror” affixed to the wall that “could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” Sound familiar? It is through this gadget that the rulers of Oceania are able to monitor the actions of its citizens every minute of every day. At the same time, the denizens of 1984 were never allowed to forget they were living in a totalitarian surveillance state, under the control of the much-feared Thought Police. Massive posters with the slogan ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ were as prevalent as our modern-day advertising billboards. Today, however, such polite warnings about surveillance would seem redundant, as reports of unauthorized spying still gets the occasional lazy nod in the media now and then.
In fact, just in time for 1984’s anniversary, it has been reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has once again been illicitly collecting records on telephone calls and text messages placed by US citizens. This latest invasion of privacy has been casually dismissed as an “error” after an unnamed telecommunications firm handed over call records the NSA allegedly “hadn’t requested” and “weren’t approved” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2013, former CIA employee Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s intrusive surveillance operations, yet somehow the government agency is able to continue – with the help of the corporate sector – vacuuming up the private information of regular citizens.
Another method of control alluded to in 1984 fell under a system of speech known as ‘Newspeak’, which attempted to reduce the language to ‘doublethink’, with the ulterior motive of controlling ideas and thoughts. For example, the term ‘joycamp’, a truncated term every bit as euphemistic as the ‘PATRIOT Act’, was used to describe a forced labor camp, whereas a ‘doubleplusgood duckspeaker’ was used to praise an orator who ‘quacked’ correctly with regards to the political situation.
Another Newspeak term, known as ‘facecrime’, provides yet another striking parallel to our modern situation. Defined as “to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense.”It would be difficult for the modern reader to hear the term ‘facecrime’ and not connect it with ‘Facebook’, the social media platform that regularly censors content creators for expressing thoughts it finds ‘hateful’ or inappropriate. What social media users need is an Orwellian lesson in ‘crimestop’, which Orwell defined as “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Those so-called unacceptable ‘dangerous thoughts’ were determined not by the will of the people, of course, but by their rulers.
And yes, it gets worse. Just this week, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘private company’ agreed to give French authorities the“identification data” of Facebook users suspected of spreading ‘hate speech’ on the platform, in what would be an unprecedented move on the part of Silicon Valley.
‘Hate speech’ is precisely one of those delightfully vague, subjective terms with no real meaning that one would expect to find in the Newspeak style guide. Short of threatening the life of a person or persons, individuals should be free to criticize others without fear of reprisal, least of all from the state, which should be in the business of protecting free speech at all cost.
Another modern phenomenon that would be right at home in Orwell’s Oceania is the obsession with political correctness, which is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.” But since so many people today identify with some marginalized group, this has made the intelligent discussion of controversial ideas – not least of all on US college campuses, of all places – exceedingly difficult, if not downright dangerous. Orwell must be looking down on all of this madness with much surprise, since he provided the world with the best possible warning to prevent it.
For anyone who entertains expectations for a happy ending in 1984, be prepared for serious disappointment (spoiler alert, for the few who have somehow not read this book). Although Winston Smith manages to finally experience love, the brief romance – like a delicate flower that was able to take root amid a field of asphalt – is crushed by the authorities with shocking brutality. Not satisfied with merely destroying the relationship, however, Smith is forced to betray his ‘Julia’ after undergoing the worst imaginable torture at the ‘Ministry of Love’.
The book ends with the words, “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Will we too declare, like Winston Smith, our love for ‘Big Brother’ above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell’s 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come to fear it is?
An awful lot is riding on our answers to those questions, and time is running out.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Xlm12L Tyler Durden
The Washington Post and New York Times have recently opened up their platforms to Op-Eds defending, justifying and promoting abhorrent behavior committed against conservatives. Calling them out is the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York, who notes that “the toxicity of the resistance to President Trump has risen in recent days,” with both papers “publishing rationalizations for denying Trump supporters public accommodation and for doxxing career federal employees.”
First up, Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the infamous Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Wiklinson unapologetically booted White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family last June. Wilkinson told the Washington Post at the time that her gay employees were too triggered by Sanders to serve her due to the Trump administration’s transgender military ban.
On Friday, Wilkinson essentially told conservatives that it’s their own fault if they are attacked in public.
In her new article, Wilkinson discussed the case of The Aviary, a trendy bar in Chicago where a waitress recently spat on Eric Trump, the president’s son. Wilkinson wrote that the incident, along with her own decision to oust Sanders, shows that in the age of Trump “new rules apply” in public accommodations: Americans who work for the administration or support the president should stay away.
“If you’re directly complicit in spreading hate or perpetuating suffering, maybe you should consider dining at home,” Wilkinson wrote.
Wilkinson noted that “no one in the industry condones the physical assault of a patron,” but at the same time declared that Americans should understand that a “frustrated person” — for example, a restaurant employee — will “lash[] out at the representatives of an administration that has made its name trashing norms and breaking backs.” Americans should accept that such things will happen.
“If you’re an unsavory individual,” Wilkinson concluded, “we have no legal or moral obligation to do business with you.” Better to stay home than risk the spittle. (And of course, Wilkinson and her colleagues in the hospitality industry will decide who is “unsavory.”) –Washington Examiner
And what constitutes an unsavory individual? Apparently half of the country!
New York Times and Doxxing
York next calls out the New York Times for allowing a University College London assistant professor of human rights, Kate Cronin-Furman, who justifies doxxing the personal details of low-and-mid level Customs and Border Protection employees who are responsible for taking care of migrant children at border detention facilities.
Cronin-Furman discussed the detentions, as well as actions by employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in terms of the Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. Those are, of course, contexts which most Americans would likely dismiss as preposterous and offensive but which Cronin-Furman and the New York Times apparently take seriously. Her idea is that opponents of the administration should publicly identify and shame low- and mid-level Customs and Border Protection employees who care for migrant children.
Such workers would be dismayed at being publicly shamed because they are “sensitive to social pressure,” Cronin-Furman wrote, “which has been shown to have played a huge role in atrocity commission and desistance in the Holocaust, Rwanda, and elsewhere. The campaign to stop the abuses at the border should exploit this sensitivity.” –Washington Examiner
“This is not an argument for doxxing,” Cronin-Furman continued. “It’s about exposure of their participation in atrocities to audiences whose opinion they care about. The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father’s arms is a serious social cost to bear. The desire to avoid this kind of social shame may be enough to persuade some agents to quit and may hinder the recruitment of replacements. For those who won’t (or can’t) quit, it may induce them to treat the vulnerable individuals under their control more humanely. In Denmark during World War II, for instance, strong social pressure, including from churches, contributed to the refusal of the country to comply with Nazi orders to deport its Jewish citizens.”
As York notes, “Needless to say, that was a clear argument for doxxing.“
Time and time again we’ve heard from the left that ‘hate speech’ is so dangerous because it could inspire people to commit violent acts.If that’s the case, why are the Washington Post and New York Times allowing people to use their platform to justify actual violence and potentially dangerous acts against conservatives? Doesn’t the same theoretical slippery slope of ideological division that ends in tiki torches and lynchings similarly feed the countless acts of actual violence committed by Antifa? We’re guessing you already know the answer.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2J0iP3R Tyler Durden
Now that the Osaka G-20 has come and gone, and while nothing has been resolved in the US-China trade war, at least there has been no escalation and China is safe from US tariffs on the remainder of its exports to the US, which in turn has given algos a dose of optimism that all is well pushing S&P futures just shy of 3,000, things in the real world are going from bad to worse.
One day after China’s official NBS manufacturing PMI on Sunday printed unchanged at 49.4 in June, below expectations of an increase from May…
… with most of the key sub-components sliding to new cycle lows:
production index 0.4 lower at 51.3,
new orders sub-index was 0.2 lower at 49.6
employment sub-index edged down 0.1pp to 46.9.
imports sub-index down to 46.8, from 47.1,
new export order index down to 46.3, vs. 46.5 in May
… the other Chinese PMI, the Caixin Manufacturing PMI, hammered expectations as it unexpectedly slumped back into contraction.
Falling from 50.2 in May to 49.4 in June, the Cixin PMI – which differs from the official, NBS report by shifting away from SOEs and large enterprises and instead focusing on small and medium businesses – was below the critical 50.0 threshold which divides contraction and expansion, for the first time in four months.
According to the report, the June data highlighted a “challenging month” for Chinese manufacturers, with trade tensions reportedly causing renewed declines in total sales, export orders and production.
Commenting on the June PMI data, Zhengsheng Zhong, Director of Macroeconomic Analysis at CEBM Group said: “The Caixin China General Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index was 49.4 in June, the second lowest since June 2016, indicating a clear contraction in the manufacturing sector, and only for the first time since late 2016, identical to China’s official Mfg PMI print (which was also 49.4).
“The subindex for new orders slid into contractionary territory, pointing to notably shrinking domestic demand. The gauge for new export orders returned to contractionary territory, but was better than the levels seen from last April to last December. Front-loading by exporters was likely to support this gauge as the China-U.S. trade relationship was under great uncertainty.
The output subindex fell into contractionary territory. The employment subindex remained relatively stable in negative territory, likely due to government policies to stabilize the job market. The State Council set up a leading group on employment in late May.
The subindex measuring sentiment toward future output plunged further, albeit staying in expansionary territory, a reflection of continuously weakening business confidence amid the Sino-U.S. trade conflict.
Overall, China’s economy came under further pressure in June. Domestic demand shrank notably, foreign demand was still underpinned by front-loading exports, and business confidence fell sharply. It’s crucial for policymakers to step up countercyclical policies. New types of infrastructure, high-tech manufacturing and consumption are likely to be the main policy focuses.”
In short, the US-China trade war is Trump’s for the taking… if he wants it: companies responded to the latest escalation by reducing headcounts further and making fewer purchases of raw materials and semi-finished items. At the same time, China appears to be sliding into stagflation, as selling prices were raised following another increase in input costs, though rates of inflation were negligible, suggesting that companies failed to pass on costs to consumers. Also, business sentiment was broadly neutral at the end of the second quarter, with firms mainly concerned about the US-China trade dispute.
It wasn’t just China that was a shitshow: Asian factory PMIs were almost universally awful on Monday, adding to the signal from the official China report out Sunday that as Bloomberg put it, “the global economy has been harpooned by the trade wars.” To wit:
Taiwan’s PMI dropped to 45.5, the lowest since 2011, and it’s now been below the 50 line separating contraction from expansion for 9 straight months — the longest since a 10-month stretch that ended in Feb. 2009.
South Korea’s gauge slumped further into contraction (47.5 vs 48.4 in May) to confirm April’s spike above 50 was an outlier
Japan’s came in at 49.3, worse than the initial reading of 49.5.
Australia’s AIG factory gauge fell into contraction for the first time since 2016
Malaysia’s PMI sank again to hold below 50.
Indonesia and Thailand’s gauges fell, while holding above 50.
The Philippines was the only substantial regional economy to see a tick up.
Meanwhile, futures blissfully continue to ignore the collapsing global economic reality, and instead rejoice at the “successful” conclusion of the Trump-Xi meeting, which notd only achieved nothing, but confirmed the status quo – massive tariffs and the threat of more.
The decision to resume talks, meanwhile, offers little cause for optimism given that this conflict has now dragged on for more than a year as Bloomberg Garfield Reynolds says, adding that “the PMIs underscore how much damage has been done by the trade spat, and even the central bank stimulus being forecast by rates markets is looking more and more like band aids that won’t stop the bleeding.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZSJcOS Tyler Durden
