Late-Night Binge-Watching Lowers Sperm Count, Study Finds Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/29/2020 – 22:30
Readers may recall we noted sperm counts in Western men had slumped nearly 60% over the decades. Though researchers have not been precise of what is causing the decline, some have suggested there’s a link with the use of electronics.
“The last several decades have been characterized by the widespread usage of digital devices, especially smartphones. At the same time, there have been reports of male fertility decline. This study aimed to assess the relationship between evening exposure to the light-emitting screens of digital media devices and sperm quality,” said Amit Green, Ph.D., head of research and development at the Sleep and Fatigue Institute at the Assuta Medical Center in Tel-Aviv, Israel, who led the study titled “Light Emitted from Media Devices at Night is Associated with Decline in Sperm Quality.”
Preliminary results showed men who use light-emitting media devices in the evening and or right before bed experienced a more significant decline in sperm quality:
“Smartphone and tablet use in the evening and after bedtime was correlated with a decline in sperm quality. Furthermore, smartphone use in the evening, tablet use after bedtime, and television use in the evening were all correlated with the decline of sperm concentration,” Green said.
“The results of this study revealed a link between evening and post-bedtime exposure to light-emitting digital media screens and sperm quality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to report these types of correlations between sperm quality and exposure time to SWL emitted from digital media, especially smartphones and tablets, in the evening and after bedtime,” he said.
For this study, researchers used semen samples from 116 men between the ages of 21 and 59. Participants were also asked about their electronic use and sleep habits.
Green also noted a relationship between sperm quality and sleeping habits. Men who slept longer had higher sperm counts, as opposed to men who had sleep disorders.
The Western world is plagued with a declining, aging, and heavily indebted population with zero interest rates, along with monetary drag, which will result in less future consumption, and force overcapacity to be cleared
So if men want to ‘make the Western world great again’ – put down the iPhone or tablet at night, your nation’s survivability depends on healthy sperm.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3b90BcK Tyler Durden
Political activists/bullies, encroaching on people’s space to make their point, and, more importantly here, trying to intimidate the people into giving up their freedom to give the rioters their way.
The first thing I want to say about this is it is a difficult situation. Especially the more middle class you are, or the more formal the setting you are in.
The first difficulty is overcoming your upbringing and being able to shift gears out of the dining mindset into the confrontation/defense mindset.
As I wrote about earlier, mindset is your friend here. You are just there to do the job at hand.
Doing the job, however, requires a few things to find the proper response.
You really need to be able to read the crowd, both the other diners and the thugs demanding your obeisance to their worldview. Can you count on help from others in the diner crowd? Maybe, but “hope” is not a plan, and you cannot count on it. The most important read you can do is on the thugs/activists.
You need to assess, rapidly, their dedication to their cause. Look for obvious clues to how violent they might be:
Are there any weapons visible?
Are they patterned in a way that provides you a more clear route to exfiltrate?
You need to be able to do this unobtrusively, quickly, and be able to process the information to make a plan of action.
There are a few basic courses of action you can take.
The first is to sit there and take it. This may sound glib, but it is not. If your threat assessment determined that they are just going to yell and scream, you can just wait it out. Obviously, threat assessment must be ongoing, because it can change at the drop of a hat.
Always be looking for routes of escape, and don’t limit yourself to the obvious ones. If it gets bad enough, people make wonderful objects to break windows or drywall to make an emergency exit with.
Sitting there and taking it was the course of action the lady in the video chose, and in this case, it worked.
The next thing you can do is to get up and make your way inside the establishment and use that changed environment to get to the exit and leave. Unfortunately, you need to stay aware of the crowd you are escaping from. A mob is very susceptible to prey drive.
As my friend Rory Miller says, they can and will escalate to violence for several reasons, including to prove they belong to the group, and you are an outsider.
Using your cell phone to call the police is an option but seems to be a low return option at this point. Due to the civil unrest/riots everywhere, they may not have resources available to help you.
What if none of these options work? Move to “desperate options”
The next options are for when your threat assessment determines that it has the potential for violence, or it is now, actively, becoming violent. Beware, these options are hard and dark.
Aggressive Escape is the first “desperate option” we will cover. Using this option, violence comes first but is not the main point of the exercise. Basically, what you are doing is picking one of the opposing crowd, and attacking them violently to make a hole you can get through.
If you hurt one of the crowd, you need to make your escape as fast as you can, as the thugs will try to get payback on you for the damage and pain you have caused. If possible, use a weapon. If you do not have one on you, a restaurant is chock-full of useful tools. A water glass driven into an eye socket or the bridge of the nose. A dinner plate, edge first to the throat, or salt/pepper shakers to the temples, candles into the eyeballs.
I’m sure you get the picture.
The crowd has turned into a violent mob, what NOW?
Next, we get to the most serious scenario. Your threat assessment has determined violence is imminent or the crowd is becoming a violent mob. This is the time to become very matter of fact and know what job you need to do.
In my classes, I simply call these things ‘maiming’, and it is only for very serious situations. This is where you begin taking people apart. We have all heard the jokes about throat punching… This is what it is for. Steak knives, gouging eyes, ripping noses, fish hooking, vile things made to make your attackers back up so you can keep making your way to escape.
There is no way to make this nice, and I want to reiterate, this is for the worst-case scenario, and it can be nasty. This is where you only do things if your life is truly in danger, and you are doing this to escape and get your people to safety.
I’d like to close this by addressing things and questions that have come up in classes or emails.
What about stun guns?
I think they are worthless. My friends and I would play tag with them when we were younger. The only thing they are good for, in my opinion, is to make a quick hole to get through in a crowd. They are not a good choice.
What about pepper spray?
Pepper spray should be thought of as an eye jab in a can, a quick distraction to either escape or launch a stronger attack with a better weapon. It is a bonus that you can beat people with the can when it is empty. If you are going to use it to make an escape opening, please use 15% or better, and spray it either directly in to the face of one person, and make sure they get all of it, or, spray in a wide ‘S’ pattern too get more people.
Bear spray or pepper grenades are awesome, but I don’t think even I would be carrying those to a nice dinner downtown.
Is a gun the ultimate solution?
Well, maybe. It depends. That would be a giant can of worms to discuss here. Suffice to say that during a mob encounter, there are some things you need to think about and practice. Be prepared for serious legal ramifications in our current climate.
Mob violence is becoming more of a normal feature of modern life in the US.
Unfortunately, the dynamics of crowd violence and mob mentality make dealing with or planning for this type of encounter difficult at best. There are no good options, and you must be able to switch tactics on the fly.
As always, awareness is your best friend and primary warning system.
Stay safe.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3b79NOS Tyler Durden
Kenosha Or Kosovo? Shocking Images Reveal Destruction After Race Riots Leave Buildings In Ruins Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/29/2020 – 21:30
Harrowing scenes of destruction have emerged from Kenosha, where several nights of BLM riots have left the Wisconsin town looking like it’s been through war.
Entire buildings have been reduced to rubble, businesses have been destroyed, and parking lots full of burnt-out cars are all that’s left in some parts of the town, after riots over the shooting of 29-year-old black suspect Jacob Blake only came to a halt after President Trump sent the National Guard to restore order.
Josh Glancy, Washington Bureau Chief of the Sunday Times documented some of the aftermath, which locals believe was caused largely by “out of towners.”
The worst hit area is uptown, beating heart of the city’s black community. Ice cream shops, nail salons, faith missions, all smouldering husks /2 pic.twitter.com/hodOHhbd16
Every single local I spoke to blamed “out of towners” for the worst of the destruction. They didn’t offer a huge amount of evidence for this, but it’s a blanket consensus /4 pic.twitter.com/vboZYrRK9y
Pretty much every boarded up shop has a mural or painting on it now. Some have plaintive requests to prospective fire starters: “Kids live upstairs” /6 pic.twitter.com/PcaNJs3lnK
The owner of this bar told me they’d opened just before the pandemic. Having eventually reopened, it was broken into this week, he estimated $25k worth of damage /8 pic.twitter.com/4BFh8zcgRM
Glancey closes by noting: As we were talking, a young man came to ask the owner where the nearest post box was. “There used to be two across the street,” he replied. “But they both just got burnt.”
Meanwhile, the Kenosha News obtained aerial images from photographer Sean Krajacic.
President Trump couldn’t have asked for a better campaign advertisement.
Success: Since the National Guard moved into Kenosha, Wisconsin, two days ago, there has been NO FURTHER VIOLENCE, not even a small problem. When legally asked to help by local authorities, the Federal Government will act and quickly succeed. Are you listening Portland?
Will they cart Biden out of his basement to do the same? We would note that Trump visited flood-ravaged Baton Rouge when he was a candidate in 2016 following Louisiana’s worst natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2DazdyC Tyler Durden
International Man: Statism has become a new religion.
A growing number of people are interested in using the State’s power to tell others how to live. They are also voting themselves freebies at the expense of others.
It’s clear that those who want to be left alone won’t be. Is it possible to find freedom in an unfree place?
Doug Casey: Back in 1973, my old friend Harry Browne wrote a really fantastic book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, where he dealt with exactly that question.
Remember, that was almost 50 years ago now—a lifetime.
The book was timely, even though the world was much freer then than it is now. We now have vastly more financial and travel controls, however—many new penalties for saying, or even appearing to think, the “wrong” things. You’re now monitored in many more ways.
Harry’s book is brilliant and actually more important to read now than it was then. His answers to how you find freedom in an unfree world are useful and relevant.
But the fact is that you can run but you can’t hide.
That’s because the world has been infected by a virus. I don’t mean the ridiculous COVID virus. I mean the virus of statism and collectivism.
There’s really nowhere you can go to be safe from it – only some places that are better than others.
For instance, the so-called Five Eyes countries – the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They were once the major bastions of Western Civilization, the only civilization – ever – that held personal freedom as an ideal. But now they’re the very ones leading the route downhill.
It’s a real problem for freedom lovers. We’re a smaller and smaller minority. Most people, however, prefer a strong leader promising the illusion of safety and security. Nothing has changed since the days of Rome. It devolved from a yeoman republic to a multicultural empire with onerous taxes in order to pay for bread and circuses to keep the capite censi under control.
In the latter days of the empire, many of its citizens attempted to escape, to live among the barbarians – even while the barbarians were taking over the empire itself. Pretty much the same thing is happening now in the West in general and the US in particular.
The best thing you can do to defend yourself—at least while it’s still possible—is to become rich enough to insulate yourself from the State. Rich enough so that even if they steal a lot from you—and they will— you still have enough. Enough to absorb the hit, keep moving, and live life as you’d like.
Let me go off on a bit of a tangent here, and look at things from the viewpoint of class. That’s perhaps appropriate in a world where neo-Marxism is being promoted everywhere. I see classes according to how they align relative to the three most important, most basic verbs in any language—be, do, and have.
If you’re lower class—which is to say have a lower class mentality— you just accept what you’re given. The lower classes are defined by psychological demoralization, apathy, and hopelessness. At best, they just think about having stuff—cars, houses, food, mates—but don’t even succeed at that very well because of their values. I doubt, however, that anybody now reading this fits into that category. Historically, they’re by far the largest group, and their numbers are now growing rapidly.
I increasingly wonder if the US even has much of an upper class any more. Being upper class is all about values, primarily being something. Money, power, and prestige don’t make someone upper class—they’re consequences of upper-class values unless you win the lottery or have great athletic, entertainment, or sometimes even business ability. Then you can masquerade for a while. But those things tend to corrupt. It’s easy to descend and become effete, entitled. Ineffectual and stagnant.
The fact is, most of us are middle class. Historically, the middle class is what America is all about; it made America unique. The work ethic, striving, and improving, doing. The middle class is being destroyed by inflation and taxes, which make it hard to save and build capital, and regulations, which make it hard to produce, to do. I’m afraid that ground between the millstones of taxes and inflation—as Lenin said—huge numbers of the middle class are descending into the ranks of the lower—the proletariat.
The three classes are natural enough. But since the invention of mass democracy, since it was turned into a worldwide secular religion around the time of World War One, there’s arisen another class—the political class. Anyone can join it. They were always there but nowhere near as hugely important or virulent. I can’t think of a single verb to define them—all the possibilities are unflattering, though. They hate the middle class, though, because its members are, by definition, productive and independent.
Anyway, these are just a few thoughts. Maybe I’ll expand on them in the future.
To get back to the original question, what you should do is become rich so you can insulate yourself to the best degree that you can from the ongoing crisis. It will eventually pass, and you can reposition yourself – if you’ve maintained some capital.
Money is far from everything, of course. It’s just a tool. But tools are helpful …
International Man: Western Civilization seems to be going downhill economically, politically, and culturally at a rapid pace. The trajectory looks grim.
However, much of the rest of the world outside of the West has their own problems. What
can freedom-loving people do not only survive but thrive in the years ahead?
Doug Casey: Once again, I’ve said this for many years, and it’s truer now than it’s ever been.
The financial and economic problems in the world are serious and accelerating. But as we go deeper into the Greater Depression, your biggest risks aren’t financial or economic. They’re political.
The only way to solve that problem from a practical point of view is to diversify politically the way you would diversify financially.
That means you should have a crib in a second or third country—as well as businesses and financial assets in others besides your home country. That’s the only thing that you can do at this point. You can vote if it makes you feel good. But, as Stalin said, it’s not who votes that counts—it’s who counts the votes. Becoming a political activist is degrading and pointless. This coming election will be largely about cheating by both sides, IMO.
The political classes everywhere are using the current COVID hysteria to cement themselves in place, and very few of the sheeple are resisting. To the contrary, they welcome it, because they think drastic actions make them safe. A degenerating society values safety above all.
It’s true everywhere, though, even in increasingly primitive places like South Africa—in fact, almost all of Africa. India is totally locked down as is most of South America. These places don’t have enough capital stored to enable an enforced vacation of several years. And that’s what we may be looking at.
It’s happening almost all over the world. The people that are being hurt the most, needless to say, are the people living hand to mouth. They’re going to be hurt even worse as all these governments destroy their national currencies—because poor people can only save the local national currency.
When their pitiful paper currency savings are wiped out, then they’re really in trouble. Will they get violent, or just roll up into a ball and die? Good question.
In the 21st century, East Asia, China, Vietnam, Korea are the best places to be. This is also true of Russia and Eastern Europe, notwithstanding the fact that China is going to have a financial collapse and may very well wind up divided into five or six smaller countries.
We’re looking at worldwide chaos in the making. I was always half kidding when answering the question, “How bad do you think the Greater Depression will be?” and I’d say, “Even worse than I think it’s going to be.” But now, it’s no joke.
Are there any options for like-minded individuals to come together if there is no perfect country or place?
Doug Casey: Everybody should read Neal Stephenson’s book, The Diamond Age.
The ideas that he developed, essentially of nation-states falling apart and being replaced with phyles, was very prescient.
Humans are social animals; we like to hang out with other people.
This is especially true with people that are like us. In other words, people that believe in the same things, that have the same values, and have the same outlook on the world.
It’s actually crazy to try to put diverse, disparate people together into the same political entity. That’s because, inevitably, any and all of the groups in that artificial political entity are going to try to get control of the apparatus of the State to benefit themselves and punish the others. Politics always results in a war of all against all.
I think Stephenson’s novel was quite correct. People will increasingly find that their real countrymen are people with whom they share values and ideas—or whatever happens to be important to them. Not a national passport. That’s just government ID, like a driver’s license.
Within that context, here in the US, Libertarians tried to put together a community, I think called the Free State Movement, centering around Keene, New Hampshire. I haven’t been there. So, I don’t know if it’s in any way successful or not, or whether the Libertarians are looked upon as some type of a weird religious cult by the locals. I don’t think it’s had any real effect on anything.
Worse, if the wrong guys get in power, the thing could backfire.
It might facilitate one-stop-shopping to find potential enemies of the State. If seriously dangerous political class types take over, as is likely in November if Biden wins the election, there’s no telling what might happen.
Of course, I tried to put something together in an obscure but very pleasant part of Argentina, La Estancia de Cafayate.
It’s been an artistic success, and it’s a great place to live. We’ve got a lot of great people living there—very enjoyable, mellow, easy-to-get-along-with company. But we attracted our share of antisocial and dogmatic nutcases. Just because someone is a political Libertarian doesn’t necessarily mean he has any other virtues. And he may be psychologically unbalanced in the bargain.
Psychology and character are the real problems. Shangri-la doesn’t exist. And it won’t until the vast majority of humans are more like Harry Browne, Ron Paul, or Lao-Tzu, and less like AOC, Pelosi, or Obama. I guess my best suggestion at this point is to look at a small town, whether you’re in the US or elsewhere, one that has a frontier culture, where people are independent-minded.
I suspect most of the people reading this now are what we’d call gamma rats.
They’re not like alpha rats, which want to boss everybody else around, taking the best mates and best territory. And beat up the beta rats, who are the vast majority of the population.
The gamma rats also tend to get the best possessions and so forth, but they don’t beat up the beta rats nor let themselves be beat up by the alpha rats. The trouble is that, in laboratory experiments, scientists found that gamma rats are only a very small portion of the population. Among humans, we’re an equally small portion of the population.
International Man: Let’s discuss some potential bright spots.
What role do you think the advancement of technology will play in empowering the individual?
Doug Casey: From Day One, technology has been the friend of the average man, and hugely beneficial. Except the effect comes in two stages. The first is usually only good for the ruling political class and bad for the average guy.
Let’s go to Stanley Kubrick’s movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember the scene where the hominids gathered around the watering hole, and the one hominid comes up with the idea of using a bone as a weapon to beat up the other group?
That was early technology. The first guy that gets technology uses it to dominate. But then after a while, it’s monkey see, monkey do. The technology spreads from the inventor or the first utilizer to the population in general, and things equalize.
It’s been that way for hundreds of thousands of years.
It was true with gunpowder. The first people that got gunpowder ran the State; they used it to keep the peasants at bay. But when it got into the hands of the peasants, they were able to use firearms to take out armored knights, which they couldn’t do before. The tables were turned.
That same was true with writing, and then the printing press. At first, they were hoarded by the political classes and priesthoods, who used them to maintain their power. The same with the computer. In the old days of ENIAC and the IBM 360, only a government or a giant corporation could afford them, and they could use them to keep track of all the little people. Now, everybody has a massively powerful laptop or cellphone. Hackers can counterattack.
I go into that theme in some detail in Assassin, the third novel in the High Ground septet. It will be released in September—lots of political implications. I urge readers who are interested to get Speculator and Drug Lord now, so as not to fall behind. Speculator is especially relevant because of what’s about to happen with gold stocks.
In other words, technology eventually turns the tables to the advantage of the average guy, even though it’s always used to suppress the average guy in the beginning.
It was technology that liberated the masses to overturn whatever the current political class might have been at the time. It has nothing to do with democracy, which is just a sop to make the peasants believe they’re in charge. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let you do it.
It’s a trend that’s going to continue. But it can be years, or even decades, before a new technology finally gets into the hands of the average guy. Then the political class wants to regulate it.
The powers-that-be treat all technologies as dangerous. Like guns, they want to keep these things out of the hands of the average guy, basically to keep the peasants from defending themselves.
But the cat always gets out of the bag in the long run. It’s a reason for long-term optimism. That said, there’s always a chance of a genuine Dark Age if the old order collapses seriously enough.
International Man: Most people are familiar with large, centralized tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
But we’ve also seen the development of decentralized technologies that empower the individual, such as encryption and the 3D printing of guns. One key example of this is bitcoin, which is a decentralized form of money.
What promise do you think decentralized technologies have for wresting power out of the hands of the State, and what are the implications?
Doug Casey: The mistake that people make with things like Facebook – a giant, amoral, and duplicitous corporation – is thinking that just because billions of people use it, it must be harmless. “Oh, it must be kind of decentralized and democratic because it lets everybody communicate with one another.”
Giant media corporations like Facebook and Google are dangerous because they can actually form people’s view of reality itself. Much more than newspapers or even TV could. The average person’s understanding of the world, what’s happening, and what other people think is no longer a product of talking to his neighbors or even looking out the window. Their opinions and emotions are now formed by looking at their little screens. That makes them very easy to manipulate.
The situation will get worse with Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality—somebody will program and control what goes into these things. Maybe subtly, or maybe very overtly. The situation is greatly aggravated by the COVID hysteria in many ways.
The solution to the danger, however, is not to regulate them. That would be totally counterproductive. Regulation just means giving even more power to the State—which is innately vastly more dangerous than any corporation. At least corporations have to provide a worthwhile service to stay in business…
What we really need is not just one Facebook where everybody goes, and can therefore be easily monitored. What we need is 10,000 Facebooks, so the power devolves to everybody and anybody.
The problem will resolve itself in the long run, though. Giant corporations become dysfunctional. Apart from that, they’re subject to the second Law of Thermodynamics as anything else. It’s one of the few laws I believe in.
That’s true, politically speaking as well. The world would have been much better off if Bismarck had not united about three hundred minor principalities and kingdoms in Germany in 1871. The world and the Germans would have been much better off in every possible way if they’d stayed three hundred fairly small, not powerful principalities.
Same in Italy, with Garibaldi. Today they’d be much better off if there were still scores of little duchies and counties. The same with India, which would be much better off if their hundreds of kingdoms hadn’t been forcibly united by the British. It’s true everywhere.
I hope, and actually expect, that places like Germany, Italy, and certainly India will once again devolve into smaller units. The way the Soviet Union broke up into fifteen, and Yugoslavia broke up into six, and Czechoslovakia split into two. The US, which has evolved into a multicultural domestic empire, should—and likely will—split up as well.
* * *
As these trends continue to accelerate, what you do right now can mean the difference between coming out ahead or suffering crippling losses. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive the crisis ahead. It will help you understand what is unfolding right before our eyes and what you should do so you don’t get caught in the crosshairs. Click here to download the PDF now.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Dax2uW Tyler Durden
Most COVID-19 Deaths In Palm Beach County Can’t Be Attributed To Coronavirus Alone, Medical Records Reveal Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/29/2020 – 20:30
An analysis of deaths in Palm Beach County medical records late last month revealed that “most” of the county’s Covid-19 deaths cannot be attributed to Covid-19 alone.
Many of the deaths “involved comorbidity like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, and more,” according to an I-Team investigation by CBS 12.
The investigation spanned 658 of the county’s “Covid deaths”. Investigators found that of the 658 cases, just 86 listed “Covid-19 pneumonia” without contributing causes as the reason for death. 3 were listed as “COVID-19 respiratory infection” without contributing causes.
94 cases were listed as a “combination of COVID-19 infection, pneumonia, and respiratory infection/failure”.
All of the other deaths involved comorbidities, the data found. In 116 cases, the death involved three or more “serious health conditions in addition to a Covid-19 infection”. One woman, who was 94 years old and had “Type 2 Diabetes, Atrial Fibrillation, and Congestive Heart Failure” had her cause of death listed as “Accute Respiratory Failure and COVID-19 pneumonia”.
Another record showed a 72 year old man who died from Sepsis and a urinary tract infection had Covid-19 listed as a “contributory cause.” 92 cases showed that Covid-19 was a contributor, but not the primary cause of death.
Dr. Terry Adirim, a Senior Associate Dean at the Florida Atlantic University College of Medicine commented: “The fact that it skews older and people with co-morbid conditions — that’s not surprising.”
Yet, she still advises young people not to ignore the data: “The more you are exposed the more likely you are to have serious illness, the more likely you are to die. And if you have been infected, even if you are younger, you are going to bring it home and bring it into your community as well.”
She continued: “I would not recommend feeling so good about getting it. We don’t have a vaccine, it’s a novel virus, and yes we are doing better treating it and yes it tends to affect people with comorbid conditions, but it’s like playing Russian roulette. It’s very likely you’re not going to shoot yourself, and it’s not likely you’ll get seriously ill and die [from COVID] but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
“It’s much more likely that we are under-counting COVID deaths,” she said without offering up direct evidence, “and that’s something that we see in pandemics.”
Investigators also found 8 erroneous deaths layered in the county’s tally. The average age of deaths in Palm Beach was 77.3 years old.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32AcJQp Tyler Durden
Israel and the United Arab Emirates are going to create a military intelligence-gathering infrastructure on Yemen’s Socotra Island, according to Arab and French sources.
The 3,650km^2 island, located south of the Yemeni mainland in the Indian Ocean, overlooks the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The straight is a sea route chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea. Most exports of oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf that transit the Suez Canal or the SUMED Pipeline pass through both the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz.
Since the start of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the UAE, formally a Saudi ally, and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, a Yemeni separatist movement that is formally allied with the Saudi-backed government in Aden, have established control over most of Socotra Island. For years, the UAE has been seeking to annex the island due to its strategic location. The collapse of the Yemeni statehood due to the years-long instability and the foreign intervention paved a way for more direct actions. The creation of a military infrastructure there is a logical step in this strategy.
According to reports, a delegation of Israeli and UAE officers recently visited the island and examined several locations for establishing the planned intelligence facilities. Earlier in August, the UAE and Israel with assistance from the United States reached a historical peace agreement relaunching diplomatic, economic and even military cooperation between the states on the highest level. The security and military cooperation in the Bab al-Mandab Strait was among the expected goals.
Arab and Iranian media allege that in 2016 Israel started building an intelligence-gathering base at the top of Mount Ambassaira, south of the Eritrean capital of Asmara. The base, according to reports, is designed to monitor the conflict in Yemen, as well as the naval situation in the region, including movements of Iranian naval forces.
The UAE, thanks to its support to the Southern Transitional Council, has already changed the balance of power in southern Yemen to its favor. If, additionally to this, Abu Dhabi succeeds in turning the Socotra Island into its outpost, the UAE will have all chances to shift the balance of power to its own favor even further.
The Emirati leadership has been slowly but steadily taking an upper hand in the diplomatic, military and economic competition with the Saudi Kingdom, which has so far suffered most of negative consequences, including direct strikes on its territory, from the conflict with Yemen’s Houthis. The peace agreement and security, military cooperation with Israel will also contribute to this scenario.
The tactical UAE-Israeli-US alliance has all chances to compete with the expanding Iranian influence in the region. Saudi Arabia, which for years was the key US ally against Iran, has been left outside of this plan. And this is very bad news for the Kingdom, which is passing through a deep economic and political crisis complicated by the barely successful invasion of Yemen.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2G3xUCE Tyler Durden
Amazon Orders 1,800 EV Delivery Vans From Mercedes, Commits To Go Carbon-Neutral By 2039 Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/29/2020 – 19:30
When Amazon made its decision to introduce hundreds of new electric vans to its delivery fleet, Tesla’s name didn’t appear to be part of the discussion. Rather, the online behemoth ordered 1,800 electric delivery vans from Mercedes-Benz, marking the biggest order of its kind to date.
Mercedes announced the order on Friday and announced it would “join a climate initiative established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. By signing up to The Climate Pledge,” according to Reuters. The pledge pins Mercedes to going completely carbon neutral by 2039.
The transport sector and shipping/delivery remains one of the biggest contributors of carbon emissions on the planet.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said: “We need continued innovation and partnership from auto manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz to decarbonize the transportation sector and tackle the climate crisis. Amazon is adding 1,800 electric delivery vehicles from Mercedes-Benz as part of our journey to build the most sustainable transportation fleet in the world, and we will be moving fast to get these vans on the road this year.”
The order is Amazon’s biggest in Europe and compliments a contract it signed last year with Rivian for 100,000 delivery vans by 2030. The order consists of 1,200 large eSprinter vans and about 600 medium-sized eVito vehicles. Delivery is slated to begin next year.
Lucien Mathieu, an e-mobility and transport analyst concluded: “Amazon’s pledge shows there’s important demand for e-vehicles from delivery fleets.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3hJ0oQ5 Tyler Durden
The extremes are not visible to the vast majority of participants, and so they are exposed to high levels of risk they don’t see or understand.
The question “Is the weather becoming more extreme?” opens up endless debates because our perceptions may differ from actual measurements since we’re prone to recency bias, where what happened recently looms much larger than events of a decade or century ago.
In the realm of economics and markets, our perceptions of extremes are backed up with data: based on the ratio of stock valuations to GDP and corporate sales (not profits, because profits are easily gamed) to GDP, the stock market has never been as over-valued as it is today.
The rally in global stocks off the March lows is the steepest such rally ever. The unemployment rate is equally extreme, as is the Federal Reserve’s money-printing: $3 trillion has been created out of thin air since February 26 as the Fed’s balance sheet rose from $4 trillion to $7 trillion.
Financial/market extremes are becoming more extreme.
The disruptive social and political consequences of systemic unfairness and extreme wealth inequality are still unfolding, as are the global consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Setting aside the specifics, can we discern systemic dynamics that could make extremes become more extreme?
Feedback loops are one such dynamic. Somewhat counter-intuitively, when feedback arises to moderate the intensity of a trend, that’s negative feedback. When feedback intensifies the trend, it’s positive feedback.
Why is this counter-intuitive? If a bad trend is moderated by negative feedback, that’s good (positive). If a bad trend gathers momentum due to positive feedback, that’s bad (negative).
When an insect population explodes higher due to ideal conditions, birds and other predators feast on the over-supply, reducing the infestation. This negative feedback moderates the damage inflicted by the infestation.
If a rapidly expanding insect horde has few predators and its range and mobility increase with every generation, allowing it to find new food sources, this positive feedback enables a vast expansion in each generation–exactly what’s we’re witnessing with locusts.
Positive feedback leads to runaway systems, i.e. run to failure where the system accelerates until it collapses.
If the system is isolated, then the damage is contained. But if the system is interconnected with others, then its failure could trigger the collapse of other systems, either as a direct (first-order) effect or as an indirect (second-order) effect.
In other words, in highly inter-connected systems, one failure can trigger a domino effect that can become non-linear once second-order effects manifest.
For example, consider the direct effects of the pandemic on small Main Street businesses. Surveys have found that around 40% of small business owners are planning to close permanently. The reasons were not surveyed, but the obvious reason is the owners don’t see a 100% return of their revenues as likely, and so it’s prudent to staunch the losses by closing now rather than risk catastrophic losses by re-opening.
The first-order effect of urban disorder is the destruction of some small businesses. This may push indecisive owners into closing for good, or considering moving to a safer locale outside the city.
The second-order effect is the re-assessment of business owners on the likelihood of further disorder in the future. If that seems probable, or even possible, the uncertainty that creates could cause customers to avoid downtown areas, even if no further disorder occurs. The uncertainty alone will diminish commerce that was already crushed by the pandemic.
There is another class of dynamics I call hidden extremes because the long-term trend appears benign even as it reaches breaking points with the potential to collapse the system.
Cost is my ongoing example. The costs of operating a small business have been rising far faster than official inflation or incomes for years. Rent, utilities, licensing fees, taxes, wages, labor overhead, insurance–virtually every category of expense has climbed inexorably for years.
These increases in fixed costs (costs that are unrelated the number of customers served) have pushed many small businesses closer to the edge of insolvency. To compensate,owners have cut employee hours and shouldered more of the day-to-day work themselves. But there is a limit on this kind of workaround; the owner can only work so many hours a day, and every additional hour increases the odds of burnout, a complete collapse of the owner’s ability to continue over-working.
I call this the Rising Wedge Model of Breakdown: costs ratchet higher effortlessly, but reducing costs encounters extreme resistance.
In other words, a consequential percentage of small businesses were at their extreme limit in the rising wedge even before the pandemic. Now the wedge has broken as their revenues falling by even a modest percentage is enough to trigger losses they cannot sustain.
Another dynamic that can make extremes even more extreme is the Pareto Distribution, a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule: the vital 20% wields outsized influence over the 80%, and the 20% of the 20% (4%) exerts outsized influence over 80% of the 80% (64%).
Just as 80% of sales come from the top 20% of sales staff and the top 20% of households end up with 80% of the wealth, the top 4% can wield non-linear influence over the 64% if they gain the power to enforce a positive feedback loop to increase their power at the expense of the 64%.
While we hope the best 4% will gain this influence, history suggests that the worst 4% (sociopaths, etc.) are highly motivated to seek power in a vacuum or when the opportunity presents itself.
The 64% tend to hope for the best even as the 4% tighten their grip on the economy and social order. This is the totalitarian feedback loop illustrated by the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in Russia.
But the 4% need not wield direct power; it is enough that they threaten or disrupt the certainty of the 64%.
For example, if the movement to de-fund police departments triggers mass resignations of police officers, the 4% criminal element will quickly increase their predation on the 64%, who will then lose the presumption of relative safety required to conduct commerce.
Again, uncertainty becomes a self-reinforcing feedback that disrupts the economy and the social order, because people make different decisions when they lack certainty in outcomes and the future.
In other words, the actual crime rate need not increase by much to trigger a complete recalculation of risk and uncertainty that could then trigger a mass exodus from city centers by small businesses and the top 20% of households with the most to lose and the most mobility.
Once these sectors abandon the city, the economy and social order collapse to levels that no one thought possible. Again, the point here is effects everyone thinks are linear quickly become non-linear: thus a 10% increase in crime doesn’t cause a linear 10% reduction in commerce, it triggers a 50% decline in commerce which then unleashes a second wave of decline as the loss of 50% of small businesses reduces the attractiveness and safety of the hollowed-out neighborhood.
In my analysis, costs for small businesses and urban residents were already at extremes that were hidden or accepted as “normal.” What few understood was how pushing costs into the top of the rising wedge made the entire system vulnerable to non-linear breakdown. This breakdown is what I see unfolding in the economy and the social order.
Extremes will become more extreme because the positive feedback loops of the Pareto Distribution are overwhelming the moderating negative feedback loops of resilience (i.e. buffers), certainty and institutional trust/credibility.
The financial system is extremely vulnerable to disruption and collapse for the same reasons: the extremes are not visible to the vast majority of participants, and so they are exposed to high levels of risk they don’t see or understand.
Trump Gains In Post-Convention Poll As Biden Support Slips Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/29/2020 – 18:30
President Trump received a healthy boost in support following the Republican National Convention, while enthusiasm former VP Joe Biden has slipped, according to a new poll by Morning Consult.
President Donald Trump needed a convention bounce — and he got one, emerging from the Republican National Convention with an improved standing against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, fueled by gains among white voters and those in the suburbs, though he still trails the former vice president nationwide.
A new Morning Consult poll conducted Friday that asked 4,035 likely voters which candidate they would pick found Biden leading Trump by 6 percentage points, 50 percent to 44 percent. It marked a 4-point improvement from his standing heading into the convention on Aug. 23, when Biden led 52 percent to 42 percent. Friday’s poll had a 2-point margin of error, compared with a 1-point margin of error for responses gathered among 4,810 likely voters on Aug. 23. –Morning Consult
Keep in mind, nearly 12% of Trump supporters won’t admit to supporting the president (though many argue that figure is much higher), while just 5.4% of Democrats won’t reveal their preferences.
What’s interesting is that Biden received virtually no boost after the Democratic National Convention, while Trump’s numbers improved after the RNC. What’s more, fewer people tuned in to watch the Republican event.
The poll results come after a convention that was less watched than the Democratic National Convention a week before. According to The New York Times, an average of 19.4 million people watched the Republican gathering each night on live TV, compared to 21.6 million who watched the DNC; Trump’s acceptance speech was viewed live by 23.8 million, less than Biden’s 24.6 million the week before.
What’s more, Biden’s lead among suburban voters was nearly cut in half after the RNC – from 14 points (54 percent to 40 percent) to 8 points (50 percent to 42 percent).
Meanwhile, a far more dramatic race is reflected in Real Clear Politics‘ betting average between Trump and Biden, using data from oddsmakers Betfair, Bovada, Bwin, Matchbook, Smarkets and SpreadEx.
Perhaps pollsters will stop oversampling Democrats this time around to give the false impression Biden is hugely popular, as they did with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then again, it might be a catch-22 if they dare to reflect actual support for Trump, or lack of faith in Biden.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34H6T2l Tyler Durden
Schiff, Pelosi Livid After Intel Community Ditches ‘Manipulated’ Election Briefings For Written Updates Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/29/2020 – 18:00
House Democrats are livid after the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, announced that US intel agencies would be pulling the plug on in-person congressional briefings on election security, and will instead be providing written updates ahead of November.
In a verbal notification to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Ratcliffe argued that the process will prevent the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, according to The Hill.
Ratcliffe followed up with Friday letters addressed to top House and Senate lawmakers in which he emphasized that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) plans to continue Congressional oversight efforts.
“The ODNI will primarily meet its obligation to keep Congress fully and currently informed leading into the Presidential election through written finished intelligence products,” read the letters, which were obtained by The Hill.
“I believe this approach helps ensure, to the maximum extent possible, that the information ODNI provides the Congress in support of your oversight responsibilities on elections security, foreign malign influence, and election interference is not misunderstood nor politicized. It will also better protect our sources and methods and most sensitive intelligence from additional unauthorized disclosures or misuse.”
Democrats are not happy
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Adam Schiff railed against the move, suggesting that it would help conceal public knowledge of foreign interference in US politics.
“This is a shocking abdication of its lawful responsibility to keep the Congress currently informed, and a betrayal of the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy. This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian,” reads a joint statement.
Pelosi and Schiff threatened that they will “consider the full range of tools available to the House to compel compliance” if the ODNI does not resume briefings, claiming it is a “shameful” attempt by the Trump administration to “withhold election-related information from Congress and the American people at the precise moment that greater transparency and accountability is required.”
CNN first reported the shift from in-person briefings to written updates.
The announcement comes after William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, released a statement detailing election security threats. –The Hill
Former acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, welcomed the move – tweeting on Saturday: “Career intelligence officials came to me to say they didn’t want to brief the Hill because the partial information leaks and manipulation of their words were detrimental to their careers,” adding “This is a very good reform.“
Career intelligence officials came to me to say they didn’t want to brief the Hill because the partial information leaks and manipulation of their words were detrimental to their careers.
