Tag: news

As American sports teams embrace the Marxism uber alles cause underlying the “Black Lives Matter” mantra spewed by every virtue-signaling celebrity and white liberal in the hopes of reaching further acceptance into whichever tribe of social media narcissists are ‘trending’ this week, the English Premier League has dared to drop its support for BLM (with capital letters).

As The Guardian reports,  Premier League footballers are to continue their support for anti-racism on the pitch but will no longer be associated with Black Lives Matter.

Policies supported by the organisation of the same name, including the defunding of police forces, subsequently proved uncomfortable for the league. The chief executive, Richard Masters, was forced to justify the endorsement in front of a DCMS select committee and told MPs:

“We’re drawing a clear distinction between a moral cause and a political movement.”

Former Stoke City player Karl Henry distanced himself from the movement after the league restarted in June, tweeting:

“I think the majority of the UK have now had enough of that organisation.

“A new inclusive and politically-neutral anti-racism movement to follow and get behind is much needed. Black people’s lives matter!”

I think the majority of the UK have now had enough of that organisation.

A new inclusive and politically-neutral anti-racism movement to follow and get behind is much needed.

Black people’s lives matter! ✊🏾

The divisive #BlackLivesMatter organisation, however, DOES NOT! https://t.co/ekdjfvw5Dx

— Karl Henry (@karlhenry08) June 29, 2020

Conservative MP Ben Bradley had also called on the Premier League to remove BLM from shirts, saying that the movement was sowing division over the issue of racism.

No Room for Racism is a campaign run by the Premier League with the support of other English footballing bodies and the anti-discrimination group Kick It Out. Launched in 2019, its aim is to eliminate racial discrimination from the sport both in stadiums and online.

“Discrimination in any form, anywhere, is wholly unacceptable and No Room For Racism makes our zero-tolerance stance clear,” Masters said.

“We will not stand still on this important issue and we will continue to work with our clubs, players and partners to address all prejudiced behaviour.”

We wonder how long before the NFL, NBA, MLB, etc… are brave enough to shrug off the capitalized “Black Lives Matter” movement’s now somewhat tyrannical control over who is worthy or not, and instead address the ‘black lives matter’ pursuit of ending racism in general – something we suspect many more Americans will be more comfortable embracing.

Authored by Alex Kimani via OilPrice.com,

A year ago, House representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, proposed the Green New Deal, a nonbinding congressional resolution that lays out a grand plan for tackling climate change by meeting 100% of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.

While the future of the clean energy proposal remains uncertain, the majority of Americans have been reading from the same page regarding what needs to be done: Dramatically cutting down the country’s reliance on fossil fuels over the next two decades is critical to lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and address climate change, with six in 10 U.S. adults saying they would favor policies with this energy goal. 

Thankfully, scientists have been researching alternative energy solutions like wind and solar power for decades, including lesser-known sources that may seem a little unusual or even downright ridiculous and unrealistic.

You can chalk up harvesting energy from blackholes to the latter category.

Fifty years ago, British mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, proposed a seemingly absurd idea how an alien society (or future humans) could harvest energy from a rotating black hole by dropping an object just outside its sphere of influence also known as the ergosphere where it could gain negative energy. Since then, nobody has been able to verify the viability of this seemingly bizarre idea–that is until now.

Half a century later, researchers have finally proven that Mr. Penrose really was onto something big.

The Penrose Process

Blackholes have captured the imagination of astrophysicists ever since the first one was discovered in 1971–and for good reason. After all, they are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects in outer space. 

Blackholes represent the end-stage of the life cycle of stars so massive that, once it’s gone supernova, the core can no longer withstand its own gravity and collapses totally into a singularity–a single one-dimensional point of infinite density. This singularity sits inside a region called the event horizon–the point at which the gravity around the black hole is so strong, not even light-speed is sufficient to achieve escape velocity.

Back in 1969, Roger Penrose proposed that if an object splits into two and one part falls into the black hole, the other part can be retrieved with more energy than the original object, because it has lost negative energy–basically saying a minus of a minus makes a plus!

Two years later, Russian physicist Yakov Zel’dovich adapted this idea and translated it to other rotating systems that we could test back on Earth. Zel’dovich predicted that waves with angular momentum–also known as “twisted waves”–reflected from a rotating metal cylinder will be amplified. The cylinder sees these twisted waves to be rotationally Doppler shifted , that is their frequency changes depending on the rotation speed. This is similar to the linear Doppler shift where the pitch of a police siren changes as it speeds past.

If Zel’dovich’s cylinder rotates fast enough then something very odd happens. The Doppler shifted frequency becomes negative. These negative frequency waves just appear to us as normal positive frequency waves. But remarkably this changes the way the waves interact with the cylinder. The metal usually absorbs the waves. But when the Doppler frequency goes negative, the absorption becomes amplification and the reflected wave has more energy than when it went in. Like with Penrose’s aliens and the rotating black hole, the twisted waves have taken energy from the rotating absorbing cylinder.

There was just one problem with Zel’dovich’s original proposal: The speed of the rotating cylinder needs to be at least 1 billion rotations per second–well beyond anything we can achieve mechanically without centrifugal pieces ripping the whole thing apart.

So there was no was no way to physically validate the theory–until a team of physicists from the University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy in Scotland came along. They devised an experiment based on Zel’dovich’s work but used sound waves instead of lightwaves. Sound waves are a million times slower than light waves, meaning the rotating disc does not need to spin nearly as fast.

Their experiment consisted of a ring of speakers set up to introduce a twist in the sound waves, analogous to the twisted light in Zel’dovich’s experiment. A rotating sound absorber made out of a foam disc was analogous to the rotating blackhole, the rotation of which would speed up as the sound waves hit it. They used a ring of speakers to create a twisted sound wave on the other side of the disc and directed it towards a rotating sound absorber and placed microphones behind the foam that also rotate, to measure the Doppler shifted waves that pass through the disc as it spins. They could play back the sound recorded by the microphones as the rotation speed increases.

The results were nothing short of amazing. As the disc’s rotation accelerated, the pitch of the sound hitting the microphones lowered until it was inaudible, then began to rise again back to the original pitch – but  a good 30% louder than the sound coming from the speakers. In essence, the sound waves were picking up additional energy from the rotating disc.

What you actually hear is the frequency of the twisted wave being Doppler shifted to zero, where it becomes too low to hear, then it gets louder again with increasing negative frequency.

If you plot the amplitude of the sound signal of the twisted wave, you notice that the sound is distinctly louder after the Doppler frequency has gone from positive to negative. In other words, the amplitude of the negative frequency waves is much larger when the absorber is rotating.

The area shaded in red is the region where the waves are taking energy from the absorber’s rotational energy. This amazing amplification effect lies at the heart of Penrose’s proposal to extract energy from black holes and could guide new experiments towards amplification of electromagnetic waves, and maybe even quantum fluctuations.

Obviously, this experiment does not not explicitly verify that Penrose’s idea for energy extraction will actually work for a black hole. Rather, it proves something that seems counter-intuitive: That shifting wave frequencies from positive to negative actually results in the waves gaining, rather than losing, energy.

We are still a long way off extracting energy from rotating black holes. Still, the latest experiment by the University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy provides a nice proof of concept that could open up new and exciting avenues of scientific exploration.

The United States’ image has tumbled to a record-low among a new 13-nation Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday. America’s reputation, nevertheless, confidence in the Trump administration, have both rapidly declined over the past year due to the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. 

President Trump attempted to boost his image last weekend in a Fox News interview, arguing his administration took “tremendous steps” at the beginning of the virus pandemic to mitigate the spread, which ‘probably saved a couple million lives’. 

But according to Pew’s polling data, much of the world sees things differently – and that data shows more than a dozen U.S.’s top allies’ public attitudes towards the U.S. and Trump are in collapse (see: here). 

Many of the allies, which include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Australia, had their share of the public give some of the lowest favorable views of the U.S. on record, going back to the early 2000s when Pew started collecting data. 

The polling data comes amid Trump’s handling of the public health crisis, after journalist Bob Woodward leaked damaging audio of the president downplaying the severity of the virus outbreak. But as readers may recall, none other than Dr.Fauci said Trump “did not distort anything and acted immediately when he was presented the data.” 

Nevertheless, “across the 13 nations surveyed, a median of just 15% say the U.S. has done a good job of dealing with the outbreak. In contrast, most say the World Health Organization (WHO) and European Union have done a good job, and in nearly all nations, people give their own country positive marks for dealing with the crisis (the U.S. and U.K. are notable exceptions). Relatively few think China has handled the pandemic well, although it still receives considerably better reviews than the U.S. response,” Pew said. 

When it comes to ratings for the US and Trump, across the 13-country median, only 34% have confidence in the US and 16% in the president. 

Attitudes towards Trump were low from the beginning compared to his predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, for the Western Europe region. 

When it comes to ratings, Trump, in his pre-presidential life, was a reality T.V. star where ratings were the only thing that mattered. The latest data from Pew explains why the president is resuming his weekly visits to “Fox & Friends,” as he must revive his image and set the story straight to the American people about his coronavirus response ahead of the presidential elections on Nov. 03. 

Authored by Timoschuk via TheDuran.com,

The political dispute between Greece and Turkey over the disputed territories continues to escalate…

On Saturday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was forced to fly to Nicosia to discuss the situation in the Mediterranean Sea. The visit took place two weeks after the telephone talks between the presidents of the United States, Turkey and the Greek prime minister.

Donald Trump was unable to effectively resolve the Turkish-Greek controversy. During the talks, Kyriakos Mitsotakis complained about “destabilizing actions of Turkey, threatening peace and stability in the region, as well as testing NATO cohesion.” In response, Erdogan claimed the readiness to conduct a dialogue to resolve contradictions.

Asa result, Ankara sent another geological reconnaissance ship to the Mediterranean Sea. And exacerbated the already tense situation.

The essence of the conflict between Turkey, Greece and Cyprus lies precisely in the fact that Turkey is conducting geological exploration of minerals in the waters that Greece and Cyprus consider their exclusive economic zone.

Asa result of the visit, Mike Pompeo supported Greece and pledged US support for the rights of Cyprus to exploit hydrocarbon reserves in its exclusive economic zone.

The fact that the United States in this situation is against Turkey can be judged by other facts. For example, the US and Cyprus are currently conducting bilateral naval exercises. In addition, a bilateral document was signed on the construction of a Cyprus Center for Land, Open Seas and Port Security (CYCLOPS). The Americans have already allocated the first tranche for its creation and operation. This is a very expressive gesture in support of the Cypriots. Typically, the American president advocates for NATO member countries to build infrastructure at their own expense. Another symbolic gesture of support for Cyprus is the lifting of the embargo on the supply of non-lethal weapons.

Such actions in the political arena are usually considered as a symbol of formal support without a major change in the military-political alignment.The Turkish Foreign Ministry reacted sharply to these US moves, saying they “poison hopes for peace in the Eastern Mediterranean and are incompatible with the spirit of alliance between Turkey and the United States”.

Earlier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Turkey’s readiness to use the Armed Forces to solve the problem. The US steps indicate that Washington believes that the political ambitions of the Turkish president can push him to a military solution to geopolitical conflicts with Greece and Cyprus.

It is worth noting that being members of NATO, Greece and Turkey have  had a bilateral armed conflict. The result was the appearance in 1974 inthe territories of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus taken away from Cyprus.

If we assess the possibility of an armed conflict, then most likely Turkey will win again. Its armed forces are stronger than the Cypriotones and have experience in real combat.

At the same time, the United States, as the leader of NATO, is faced with the task of preventing a military conflict between the two members of the alliance. And this task is no longer only internal relations within NATO. With his behavior, Erdogan is effectively defying America and demonstrating a reluctance to obey. And the whole world is watching the result of the confrontation.

In addition, the conflict between Turkey and Greece calls into question the ability to provide security. If a military clash between the two countries occurs, it will deal a significant image blow to the United States and will certainly shake the partners’ faith in NATO.

Just after Moscow announced Tuesday that Russian force reserve units would be withdrawn from the Lithuanian border, top Russian officials have slammed NATO “flexing its muscle” during the ongoing ‘Tobruq Legacy 2020’ drills in Lithuania. 

A top official, Alexander Kanshin, who heads the Association of Unions of Reserve Officers said that while “alarming,” it’s not expected that NATO will take “any real military action against Belarus,” according to his comments in TASS.

But it was the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, who issued the most directly provocative comments Thursday. The powerful intelligence chief charged that the United States is “stage managing” the unrest in Belarus, which has since the Aug.9 reelection of President Alexander Lukashenko sought to topple him.

He described that US intelligence, NGOs, and Western state linked media had funded ground protests to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Over prior weekends protests in the streets of Minsk alone have swelled to 100,000 people according to most estimates. 

“Though publicly Washington tries to keep a low profile, once the massive street demonstrations began, the Americans stepped up funding to the Belarusian anti-government forces bountifully to the tune of tens of millions of dollars,” Naryshkin said, also calling US and Western involvement “obvious” – however, not presenting any specific evidence or intelligence, only outlining the scenario he said is already long in action.

Tweet from a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and self-described “media trainer”:

#Belarus. Excellent video from today’s March of Heroes in #Minsk.Absolutely peaceful people are demanding justice and democracy,but the authorities are responding with force and repressions.This scale, this consistency are unprecedented in modern Belarus.This can’t be for nothing pic.twitter.com/8337NQPExa

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) September 13, 2020

“The demonstrations have been well organized from the very outset and coordinated from abroad,” he said. “It is noteworthy that the West had launched the groundwork for the protests long before the elections. The United States in 2019 and early 2020 used various NGOs to provide about $20 million for staging anti-government demonstrations,” Naryshkin alleged.

He said “ostensibly independent bloggers” were organizing social media campaigns at the behest of more powerful interests.

Describing a classic ‘color revolution’ scenario, the SVR director highlighted the involvement of US and EU NGOs which were providing training in eastern European countries and border states with Russia.

“Some of them underwent training in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, where experienced US instructors coached them to stage ‘non-violent’ protests,” Naryshkin said.

He also noted that the US is “closely mentoring former presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and other opposition activists, whom they try to present in the guise of ‘popular leaders’ and future top officials of a ‘democratic Belarus’.”

On Tuesday in a meeting between Putin and the embattled Lukashenko, Putin emphasized in statements to the press that Belarus must resolve its own issues internally, but without any foreign interference. 

However, it’s unclear the degree to which Putin would get more involved on an overt level, so long as any alleged Western meddling remains under the surface. 

Of course, Western intelligence and media no doubt see Russia’s own covert meddling at work in propping up Lukashenko, but at this point it doesn’t appear either side wants to take things toward a costly, full-blown Ukraine scenario. 

Authored by Alexander Zhang via The Epoch Times,

The Chinese regime “poses the greatest threat to world order,” Britain’s Chief of Defence Intelligence told British media this week.

Lt. Gen. Jim Hockenhull, speaking at the first media briefing at the UK’s Defence Intelligence hub based at the Royal Air Force base in Wyton, Cambridgeshire, discussed how “global players such as Russia and China continually challenge the existing order without prompting direct conflict, operating in the expanding grey-zone between war and peacetime,” the Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

While Hockenhull saw Russia as posing “the greatest military and geopolitical threat to European security,” he reserved the starkest warning for China’s communist regime, The Telegraph reported.

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers take part in a performance during an open day at Stonecutters Island naval base in Hong Kong, on June 30, 2019. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

China is “increasingly authoritarian and assertive,” he said. “It poses the greatest threat to world order, seeking to impose Chinese standards and norms and using its economic power to influence and subvert, backed up by massive investment in modernizing its armed forces.”

According to The Sun, Hockenhull said that Beijing had accelerated its modernization of the military since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

The Chinese military now boasts “an array of leading-edge weapons systems that are fast eroding Western military advantages,” he said, according to The Sun, adding, “Its growing fleet of Renhai-class destroyers are the most capable of any navy.”

A Chinese navy formation, including the aircraft carrier Liaoning (C), during military drills in the South China Sea, on Jan. 2, 2017. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The shifting global picture has changed the character of warfare in ways that will challenge the West to keep pace with adversaries who do not play by the rules, Hockenhull said, according to the Ministry of Defence.

He warned that conflict is bleeding into new domains such as cyber and space, threatening Britain’s cohesion, resilience, and global interests.

“Whilst conventional threats remain, we have seen our adversaries invest in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and other ground-breaking technologies, whilst also supercharging more traditional techniques of influence and leverage,” he said.

A Long March 3B rocket carrying the Beidou-3GEO3 satellite lifts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Xichang in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province on June 23, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The UK government is conducting a comprehensive review of its foreign, security, and defense policy.

As part of the review, Britain’s Ministry of Defence is planning to pivot away from traditional defense and “operate much more in the newest domains of space, cyber, and sub-sea,” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said in July.

Both Russia and China have been developing offensive space weapons and upgrading their capabilities, Wallace wrote in The Telegraph.

Cyber-attacks by hostile state actors are also seen as posing a heightened risk to the UK, especially during the pandemic caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

Medical workers take swab samples from residents to be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus, in a street in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on May 15, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

On July 22, UK’s Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said he was “deeply concerned” over evidence that “China is engaged in malicious cyber attacks against commercial, medical and academic institutions, including those working to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.”

A day earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that two Chinese hackers had been indicted for targeting businesses and government agencies in several countries, including the UK, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Australia, and Japan, for stealing millions of dollars worth of trade secrets and other sensitive information, and attempting to steal research on COVID-19.

On May 5, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency (CISA) issued a joint advisory, exposing malicious cyber campaigns targeting international health-care and medical research organizations involved in the coronavirus response.

To counter cyber threats, the UK government announced that health-care businesses will be able to get government-funded training in order to boost their cyber-security and protect sensitive data.

Leaked emails between the senior adviser to Nashville’s Mayor and a health department official reveal a disturbing effort to conceal extremely low coronavirus cases emanating from bars and restaurants, while the lion’s share of infections occurred in nursing homes and construction workers, according to WZTV Nashville.

On June 30th, contact tracing was giving a small view of coronavirus clusters. Construction and nursing homes causing problems more than a thousand cases traced to each category, but bars and restaurants reported just 22 cases.

Leslie Waller from the health department asks “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?“

“Correct, not for public consumption.” Writes senior advisor Benjamin Eagles. –WZTV

Four weeks later, Tennessean reporter Nate Rau asked the health department: “the figure you gave of “more than 80” does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?“

To which health department official Brian Todd scrambled for an answer – asking five health department officials: “Please advise how you respond. BT.”

The response – from an official whose name was omitted from the leaked email: “My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site,” adding “We could still release the total though, and then a response to the over 80 could be “because that number is increasing all the time and we don’t want to say a specific number.””

According to a metro staff attorney asked by city councilmember Steve Glover to verify the authenticity of the emails, “I was able to get verification from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Health that these emails are real.”

Glover told WZTV: “They are fabricating information. They’ve blown there entire credibility Dennis. Its gone i don’t trust a thing they say going forward …nothing.”

Glover says he has been contacted by an endless stream of downtown bartenders, waitresses, and restaurant owners. Why would they not release these numbers?

“We raised taxes 34 percent and put hundreds literally thousands of people out of work that are now worried about losing their homes their apartments etcetera and we did it on bogus data. That should be illegal!” he says.

Again, we weren’t told by the mayor’s office this wasn’t true. We were told to file a freedom of information act request. –WZTV

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

In an interview ahead of the signing ceremony for the normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Trump said he would be willing to sell other countries in the Middle East “the same advanced weapons” the US sells to Israel.

“They’re very wealthy countries for the most part,” Trump told Fox News. Trump also mentioned the UAE’s desire for US-made F-35s and said he would “personally not have a problem” with the UAE acquiring the warplanes.

Since the normalization agreement was announced, there have been reports that the UAE F-35 sale was part of the deal. The treaties that were signed on Tuesday made no mention of F-35s, but the sale is clearly still on the table.

He noted that the UAE wanted to buy some fighter jets, adding: “I personally would have not problem with it. Some people do, they say… maybe they go to war.” — Reuters

President Trump is a big fan of selling weapons to Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. The president has boasted about the billions of dollars in weapons the Kingdom has purchased and has vetoed efforts by Congress to end such sales.

Congress tried to prohibit arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in an effort to end US support for the war in Yemen, where the US-backed Saudi-led coalition regularly kills civilians.

Israeli PM Netanyahu with “key to the White House” presented to him by President Trump and Melania Trump pic.twitter.com/uj3TMuvn4F

— Steve Holland (@steveholland1) September 15, 2020

The atrocities in Yemen are so bad that US officials in the State Department fear being arrested overseas for war crimes for their role in facilitating the weapons sales.