Tropical Storm Dorian could strengthen into a hurricane this week. Now would be the time for President Trump to go ahead with his plan of nuking a hurricane to prevent landfall.
Dorian is strengthening Monday evening as it moves towards the Lesser Antilles, a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea that border the Atlantic Ocean, and could strike Puerto Rico and or Florida by the weekend.
A tropical storm warning has been issued for Barbados, Martinique, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. A tropical storm watch is in effect for Dominica, Saba, St. Eustatius, and Grenada. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) expects tropical storm conditions to appear in the warning and watch areas by late Monday night.
The NHC expects Dorian to strengthen into a hurricane on Tuesday as it passes the Windward Islands, which include Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Martinique. By late Tuesday into early Wednesday, the system could develop into a full-blown hurricane with direct impact risks for Puerto Rico later in the week.
As of Monday evening, Dorian’s maximum sustained winds were around 60 mph, which is 14 mph shy of a category one hurricane.
Dorian’s positioning was about 95 miles east-southeast of Barbados and 205 miles east-southeast of St. Lucia and was moving west-northwest at 14 mph.
“Dorian will continue to progress toward the Lesser Antilles tonight, then Puerto Rico and Hispaniola later this week. The system will interact with plentiful wind shear and dry air midweek, limiting its strengthening potential. Regardless, hurricane conditions are possible in the eastern Caribbean through the middle of the week. Beyond this, the status of the system will be dependent on where it tracks and is highly uncertain. If the storm interacts with the mountainous terrain of Hispaniola, it will weaken considerably. It is does not, the Bahamas and possibly the Southeast may see impacts next weekend into the following week from this storm,” reported Meteorologist and owner of Empire Weather LLC., Ed Vallee.
The National Weather Service (NWS) tweeted Sunday it’s “too early to speculate” if Dorian will impact Florida.
Tropical Storm Dorian continues to churn towards the Lesser Antilles this morning. The risk of direct impacts to Puerto Rico have increased and Tropical Storm/Hurricane Watches are likely to be issued later today.https://t.co/XZO7pOrOHApic.twitter.com/47LuZV8VXS
Computer models show Dorian could strike Puerto Rico on late Wednesday, the Dominican Republic by late Thursday, and the Bahamas from mid-Friday through Saturday. By late Saturday, South Florida could be in the crosshairs of the storm.
It remains to be seen if President Trump will nuke Dorian…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2L8dmrH Tyler Durden
The US president has so far managed to keep the market buoyant by offering economic hope to calm nerves. As China’s economy continues to slow, and more multinationals begin to feel the pain, the tipping point may not be too far off…
It is now clear that no deal is likely in the US-China trade war. As the rivalry morphs into a cold war, the close economic ties between the two are simply untenable. However, US President Donald Trump is still talking up a deal , if not this year, then in 2020. He is trying to keep the US stock market bubble afloat. If the market stays up, he is likely to be re-elected. If not, it is “Adios, Trump”.
The US market has gone through another convulsion over recession prospects. Both the market and Trump thought that a Fed rate cut would revive the market. It may have had the opposite effect. The Fed’s move has only magnified the recession fear. Why would the Fed cut rates otherwise?
As the US unemployment rate is still at a historical low, the recession fear may seem odd. But, now is not a normal time. After the 2008 global financial crisis, the global economy has come back with more debt and more asset bubbles. In a bubble economy, recession is a self-fulfilling expectation.
The property bubble in China and the stock bubble in the US have led the global economy since 2008. The US stock market surpassed 100 per cent of GDP in 1996 for the first time in history and was above 150 per cent at the recent peak. The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (Cape) recently went over 30. It would appear that the US stock market was 50 per cent hot air based on historical valuation metrics.
The market bubble pumped up the value of Amercia’s US$30 trillion pension assets, which still has a shortfall of US$3-4 trillion. Like Trump said, if the market pops, Americans could kiss their pensions goodbye. As baby boomers are retiring en masse, massive pension shortfalls will surely lead to recession and even political turmoil.
China’s property bubble is bigger than the US stock bubble. It is likely to be over five times GDP in value. The hot air in the price accounts for more than 50 per cent. Most of China’s debt, which now tops 300 per cent of GDP, is backed up by property. It can keep going only if the debt continues to rise faster than GDP. Any deleveraging campaign, which the country tried a couple of years ago, would pop the bubble.
The Chinese government can intervene in a market process in all of its aspects. It can restrict buying and selling. It can change expectations by massaging statistics or media content. The end goal seems to be to stage a silent explosion, adjusting the market without people realising it, like slowly boiling a frog. Chinese bubbles don’t burst; they just fade away.
The adjustment in China’s property market was the main factor in the global economy slowing. The Trump bull market has mitigated some of its fallout in the past two years. If the Trump bull market bursts, a global recession is inevitable and could be quite deep.
And a debt crisis may return in Europe. With national debt at 131 per cent of GDP, Italy looks really dicey. A global downturn could tip it over, which would blow up Europe’s banking system.
Trump has succeeded in keeping the stock market afloat by always dangling some hope whenever it became jittery. A trade deal was always a couple of weeks away. Now, no one believes that. He is trying to talk about a deal in 2020 to see if the market would buy it. As a backup, he is talking about a cut in payroll tax. If neither works, he will come up with something else. This high-wire act will last all the way through next year’s election season.
So far, Trump has been lucky.Usually, a bubble pops when it stops rising. Trump has managed to keep it in the range over the past year. He may not be so lucky in the coming months. As China’s economy continues to slow, more and more multinational corporations will report bad earnings numbers. The tipping point for speculators to run for the exit may not be too far off.
If and when a recession arrives, it would be difficult for the world to come out of it. The structural problems that led to the 2008 global financial crisis have only become worse. Debt leverage has risen among all major economies.
The world agrees on only one solution – which is, the central banks releasing more money during a recession. It works by raising asset prices – that is, creating another bubble. Maybe it will work again. But Sino-US rivalry makes it less likely.
Since the end of the cold war in 1989, the world has experienced one bubble after another. There was a deflationary impact from the collapse of the Soviet bloc, less competition for resources, which made monetary policies more bubble-prone.
The vanishing fear factor was probably a major contributor, too. Animal spirit thrives during prolonged peace. Another cold war would put the fear factor back on the table and hold the animal spirit in check. Hence, another bubble-led recovery may not be forthcoming.
Indeed, more monetary stimulus may lead to rising inflation expectations, like in the 1970s, and trap the world in stagflation.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to get your polyester suit and platform shoes ready. Saturday Night Fever may be coming back.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2PeFXRm Tyler Durden
The wife of a NASA astronaut claimed that her identity was stolen and her bank account accessed without permission while her wife was on a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station, according to Fox News.
Astronaut Anne McClain has been involved in a bitter divorce with former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden since 2018, but the battle recently took an unexpected turn when Worden filed a complaint with the FTC and NASA’s OIG accusing her wife of assuming her identity and gaining improper access to her financial records while she was orbiting the earth.
Worden said she found out when her wife had knowledge about her private spending while on a mission – information she would otherwise have no knowledge of.
She then contacted her bank and was informed that her sign in credentials were used by a computer registered to NASA.
“I was pretty appalled that she would go that far. I knew it was not O.K.,” Worden said.
McClain denies the allegations and says that she was acting in routine fashion by checking the family’s finances to make sure they had money to pay their bills for their son. Their child has also come up during the divorce.
Worden had a son about a year before she met McClain and after they wed in 2014, she refused McClain’s request to adopt the child.
McClaine then took Worden to court in 2018 to get shared parenting rights after accusing the boy’s mother of having a temper and making poor financial decisions, but this lead toward Worden filing for divorce after pictures of her son and McClain were posted on Twitter.
A short time later, McClain went on mission with NASA. NASA officials stated that they were unaware of any previous crimes committed on the International Space Station.
Ain’t love grand?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30CzjFR Tyler Durden
Over the past few months, both mainstream and alternative news outlets have been covering massive protests in Hong Kong where tens of thousands of people have taken part in demonstrations that have since devolved into violence both with police, counter-protesters, and others. These protests have seen injuries on both sides and have now caught the eye of the world.
But the question is more nuanced than simply whether or not one supports the protests. After all, we have seen plenty of protests in the past that, at first glance, seemed legitimate, but unfortunately turned out to be merely tools of Western governments. So the first question is “Are the protests legitimate or are they a color revolution?” In 2019, it is no longer safe to assume that protesters are organic. However, it is also not safe to assume that every action of civil unrest is because the United States has organized a coup.
The Back Story
Before we look into whether or not the protests are legitimate, it is important to understand the trigger for the demonstrations that are currently taking place. The first protests in Hong Kong began in response to a proposed extradition bill that would have seen individuals who are wanted in territories with which Hong Kong does not have an extradition agreement to be detained. Many of the opponents of the bill felt that it would have placed both Hong Kongers and visitors to the territory essentially under the jurisdiction of mainland China, thus making the “one country, two systems” setup obsolete. Others, however, argued that the extradition bill made sense. After all, since it would be difficult to negotiate an extradition agreement with Taiwan or China, it would be useful to at least provide some sort of avenue for justice for individuals who committed crimes and subsequently crossed the border to evade jail time or other punishment.
It is worth noting that the bill was submitted by the Hong Kong government. It is also worth pointing out the complexities of the “One country, two systems” agreement whereby the British, after decades of imperialist rule over Hong Kong, ceded it back to China in 1997. The British forced Beijing to accept a number of conditions such as the agreement that Hong Kong would draft a mini-Constitution and retain its capitalist system, own currency, legal and legislative system as well as individual rights and freedoms. However, this agreement was only to last for fifty years, when the agreement is set to expire and Hong Kong is to be fully returned to China in 2047.
The first protests began in late March and early April and gradually increased in June when hundreds of thousands of protesters entered the streets. June 12 saw an increase of violence with clashes between protesters and police, who brought out the tear gas and rubber bullets. An even larger march began on June 16. On July 1, hundreds of thousands of people turned out for the annual July marches and a number of these protesters split away from the main demonstration to break into the Legislative Council Complex where they vandalized a number of government symbols and briefly occupied the building.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam suspended the bill on June 15, declaring it “dead” on July 9 though she did not clearly state that the bill would be withdrawn or not revisited. Executive Council members Regina Ip and Bernard Charnwut Chan then stated publicly that the government would be making no more concessions.
Protests have continued throughout the summer and have resulted in increasingly violent confrontations between police and activists. In addition, pro-China “triad” members (organized crime) clashed with the protesters. A portion of the local residents also began to counter-protest the original protesters and clashes then broke out between the two.
For instance, on July 21, a mob of men dressed in white shirts attacked protesters, travelers, and journalists at a Hong Kong train station, injuring 45 people and leaving the train station floor stained with blood.
Demands being made by the protesters have gradually increased in number. They have called for the following:
An independent inquiry on police brutality
Release of arrested protesters
Retraction of the official characterization of the protests as “riots”
Direct elections for the positions of Legislative Council members and the Chief Executive
Complete withdrawal of the extradition bill from the legislative process
Resignation of Carrie Lam
Who Is Behind The Protests?
As soon as protesters took to the streets, Chinese government officials were accusing the United States and its NGO networks of being behind the movement as an effort to weaken China and cause chaos in the process of eventual reunification. Many in the alternative media immediately began reporting on the color revolution taking place in Hong Kong while the mainstream Western press began praising the protesters for their courage and criticizing the Hong Kong police for their brutality.
So is there any evidence that the Hong Kong protests are controlled or being directed by the United States or its NGO community that has created so many color revolutions across the world? The short answer is yes.
For instance, one of the recognized leaders of the protest movement is Joshua Wong, who is a leader and secretary-general of the “Demosisto” party. Wong has consistently denied any links to the United States and its NGO apparatus. However, Wong actually traveled to Washington DC in 2015, after the conclusion of the Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution to receive an award given to him from Freedom House, a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy. Demosisto has been linked with the National Endowment for Democracy as well.
For those that may be unaware, the NED is an arm of the US State Department designed to sow discord in target countries resulting in the overthrow, replacement, or extraction of concessions from governments of target countries.
Indeed, Jonathan Mowat adds to the recent historical understanding of the controlled-coup and color revolutions in his article, “The New Gladio In Action: ‘Swarming Adolescents,’” also focusing on the players and the methods of deployment. Mowat writes,
Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel’s “Velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros’ foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.
Nathan Law, another leader of the Hong Kong protests and rock star of the Umbrella Revolution, is also closely connected to the National Endowment for Democracy. On the NED website, “World Movement for Democracy,” in a post entitled “Democracy Courage Tribute Award Presentation,” where the organization mentions an award it presented to Law. In the article, it states,
The Umbrella Movement’s bold call in the fall of 2014 for a free and fair election process to select the city’s leaders brought thousands into the streets to demonstrate peacefully. The images from these protests have motivated Chinese democracy activists on the mainland and resulted in solidarity between longtime champions of democracy in Hong Kong and a new generation of Hong Kong youth seeking to improve their city. The Hong Kong democracy movement will face further obstacles in the years to come, and their idealism and bravery will need to be supported as they work for democratic representation in Hong Kong.
Interestingly enough, Joshua Wong has shown up to express “solidarity” with other protest movements engineered by the United States and its NGO apparatus, particularly in Thailand where Western NGOs and the US State Department are controlling both the protest movement and the former government.
For a short overview of how such operations work, watch the video below, a BBC report on the Oslo Freedom Forum which shows some of the leaders of today’s Hong Kong protests as well as leaders of the Umbrella Revolution and other global “protest movements” being trained by the US State Department/NGO apparatus in 2013.
Also see my previous articles on the topic linked below:
Notably, these protests are receiving heavy media coverage as well as the ever-present logo (umbrellas), both hallmarks of color revolutions and social media giants Twitter and Facebook have accused China of spreading disinformation via their accounts and have been removing or blocking pro-China accountsindicating that someone in the halls of power in the West would like to see the protests continue.
So Why Does The US Support The Protests?
The United States State Department and its subsidiary color revolution apparatus does not support protest movements because it supports right and freedom for people in other countries. After all, the US government as a whole does not support rights and freedom for its own people. So, in full knowledge that the US government does support the Hong Kong protesters, the question then arises, “Why?”
There are at least three reasons why the US is supporting the Hong Kong protest movement, none of which involve the rights of Hong Kongers. First, with China set to fully acquire Hong Kong in 2047 and growing integration between Hong Kong and China over the next three decades, the United States does not want to see China grow any stronger as an economic, military, or diplomatic powerhouse. The full return of Hong Kong to China would further Chinese growth in all three of these areas.
Second, the United States benefits from a weaker Chinese government and one that is not able to fully impose control on every citizen within its borders. This is why the US has funded destabilization movements all across China, many with real concerns, as well as terrorist attacks in areas where China is planning to develop in the third world.
Lastly, Hong Kong currently acts as a tax haven for Western corporations and as a dumping ground for wealth that needs to avoid taxation. Chinese control may very well threaten that wealth, particularly in light of the fact that the Trump administration is moving forward on an apparent plan to put the United States on a more fair footing with China in terms of international trade through tariffs and increased worker protections.
Geopolitical Concerns
In short, by maintaining Hong Kong as-is, the United States would maintain an outpost alongside China’s borders. However, China not only views Hong Kong as physical territory and financial wealth, it understands that, in a trade or real war with the United States, Hong Kong can be used to not only physically position military forces but it can also be used to economically loot the mainland.
While the United States may be funding and directing many of the protest leaders in Hong Kong, the fact remains that the protesters themselves as well as the many people who support them have legitimate reasons to be protesting. Indeed, in the case of Hong Kong, it appears that the nefarious American desire to weaken China and protect its corporate tax haven have intersected with the very real need of Hong Kongers to preserve what’s left of the liberty they have.
In order to understand this, it is necessary to understand that there is a plethora of opinions on the Hong Kong issue within Hong Kong itself. First, it seems the dividing line of opinions often centers around age, heritage, and geopolitics. From reading mainstream reports and watching a number of videos, it is apparent that the majority of protesters are young, even university-educated people who have lived their lives in Hong Kong while the counter protesters seem to be older, with a stronger heritage link to China. This older generation should not be conflated with oldest, however, as it appears that many are from the “baby boomer” era more-so than the elderly generation before it. That being said, age is not a clear cut line of difference, however, with a number of younger and older people choosing to support opposite sides. Like any protest movement, the majority of the people of Hong Kong can be found going about their everyday business, teetering on the edges of any engagement whatsoever.
One such reason that the oldest and the youngest protesters seem to intersect, however, is, in the case of the oldest, a memory of what life was like in neighboring China before the Cultural Revolution and the ability to watch that way of life change for the worst and eventually horrific. The youngest members of the “anti-China” crowd may be viewing the issue similarly for the completely opposite reason, precisely the fact that they grew up in a time knowing nothing but freedoms their neighbors could scarcely dream of.
It is also important to point out the cultural difference in Hong Kong, which is essentially Chinese culture at heart, but one that has embraced capitalism and has experienced rights that mainland Chinese people can only dream of. Based on Common Law, this includes the right to freedom of speech. As the Financial Times wrote in 2018,
For more than two decades, citizens and residents in the former British colony of Hong Kong have enjoyed a wide range of freedoms and legal protections unthinkable in any other part of the People’s Republic of China. These protections, guaranteed by the territory’s tradition of judicial independence, are the bedrock of the city’s extraordinary success as a regional entrepôt. It is precisely because of these legal safeguards that many international companies, including most global media organisations, have chosen to base their regional headquarters in Hong Kong.
As mentioned earlier, one reason the “lease” of Hong Kong was pushed back for so long a time (to be fully realized in 2047) is because it would erase an entire generation of people who remembered what such little freedom was like compared to the zero freedom afforded by China. However, what was perhaps unintended was a birth of an entire generation of people who only knew that freedom and are not as keen to give it away as others may have been. This is one reason you can see young people in the streets with signs supporting freedom of speech and even calling for the right to own and bear arms. In other words. you are able to see so many people who have been denied rights Americans take for granted or are under threat of losing even more of their rights desperately trying to gain or retain them, all while many Americans march in the streets to have those same rights taken away. Clearly, it is true that freedom is treasured the most when it is lost.
This threat of Chinese takeover is very real. With its brutal authoritarian methods of control, social credit systems, slave labor economy, and polluted food supply, many young Hong Kongers are rightfully terrified of what “one country, one system” will mean for them. China is a communist nightmare, no matter how much Western leftists would like to portray otherwise.
Nowhere is there more clear an example of “Western” arrogance than a widely-circulated video where an angry Australian lectures young Hong Kong protesters on how much “better everything is gonna be” when China takes over both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Coming from a country with virtually no rights and doing business in another, it may be par for the course for him. But there is something incredibly irritating to watch his denial of these protesters’ legitimate concerns and his lecturing on the part of the authoritarian regime that will soon be in power.
This (the threat of quickly descending into the clutches of Chinese authoritarians) is the very real concern the Western NGOs have seized upon in order to foster social unrest in Hong Kong.
Violence – Violent Counter Protests
There have been numerous videos depicting violence coming from both sides of the isle. On one hand, violence on the Hong Kong side has been blamed on anarchists, often a typical method of specific types of anarchists as well as police false flagging in order to justify a crackdown. Other videos have surfaced showing protesters beating “journalists” and those who disagree with them. The justification given by the protesters were that the individuals were “Chinese agents,” a claim that may or may not be true.
Likewise, we have seen numerous videos of counter-protesters also engaging in violence against the Hong Kong protesters, many of whom being members of Hong Kong/Chinese organized crime as mentioned earlier. The videos depicting police attacks against protesters have also been widely circulated in the media.
Scale Of Protests VS Counter Protests
The Hong Kong protests have spread from Hong Kong itself to all across the world with the immigrant community engaging in demonstrations in their adopted countries. Likewise, counter-protests have expanded globally.
There is very little doubt that the protests against greater Chinese involvement in Hong Kong have been much larger than those supporting it. One need only look at the numbers of the protests that took place on August 17 where 1.7 million people showed up to march.
What A Good Outcome Would Look Like
To claim that the protesters have a legitimate cause while, at the same time, pointing out that the US is directing the leaders of their movement may seem contradictory but, unfortunately, it is not. It should be possible to any unbiased observer to understand that the protesters are justified in their fear of being taken over by a country that just finished slaughtering 80 million people and that is currently oppressing each and every one of their citizens. It should also be possible to understand that the Western NGOs have seized upon this fear and desire for freedom for its own nefarious purposes. Only those who wish to promote an ideology would refuse to mention both aspects of the protests, something both the mainstream and alternative media outlets have unfortunately been guilty of.
So with all this in mind, what would a positive outcome be?
1.) First, the United States must cease using its NGO community or intelligence agencies to direct and manipulate an uprising or unrest in Hong Kong. The future of Hong Kong is for Hong Kongers to decide, not under the manipulation of Western NGOs. The US must immediately cease fostering dissent in other nations. If the US wants to counter Chinese empire, it must do so by offering economic and other incentives and not by threats, social unrest, or violence.
2.) None of the protesters’ demands thus far are unreasonable. There should be an independent inquiry as to the techniques being used by police, police brutality, and the connections these tactics have to the growing Chinese influence in Hong Kong. Protesters who have been arrested for their political views (not those arrested for offensive violence, rioting, or peddlers of foreign influence) should be released. While official categorizations are no issue to fixate upon, the protests should be reclassified as what they are, protests. Elections should be instituted and the people of Hong Kong should elect their Legislative Council and Chief Executive directly. Withdraw the extradition bill completely from consideration until a reasonable proposal can be drafted, discussed, and agreed upon. Carrie Lam is widely known as a tool of Beijing and, for this reason, a gradual, orderly, and democratic transition of power should take place.
In addition, while not official protest demands, the solidification of the rights to free speech, expression, possession of weapons, and privacy should take place.
3.) Just as the United States should stop inserting itself into the domestic life of Hong Kong, so should China immediately cease any and all attempts to control public opinion, social discourse, and political life in Hong Kong. Because of China’s lack of human rights within its own borders, there is a legitimate reason for Hong Kong to desire complete separation from the mainland. Thus, if China is not interested in becoming a free society, the “One country, two systems” policy must be extended abandoned and Hong Kong should remain independent.
Conclusion
By now, it should be relatively clear that many of the leaders of the Hong Kong protests are controlled and directed via the network of United States intelligence agencies and NGO apparatus for the purpose of protecting its corporate tax haven, keeping a friendly outpost on the Chinese border, and sowing seeds of discord within China itself.
However, the protesters are absolutely right in their concern for what will happen if they become part of China – i.e., another human tragedy that is the result of Communist authoritarianism exhibited by the Chinese government.
Thus, both the official and the mentioned unofficial demands are entirely reasonable. The people of Hong Kong must not be forced to live oppressed under authoritarian Chinese rule. Because the US has its own interests that do not involve freedom or human rights, it would be wise of the Hong Kong protests to abandon their Western-backed opposition leaders and find real organic leaders that are not taking orders from the West.
They should, however, continue to press for the rights they have and the rights they deserve.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30D1OD5 Tyler Durden
Huawei has engaged in talks with the Russian government to install Russian operating system (OS) Aurora on 360,000 tablets to be used in next year’s census in Russia, according to Reuters.
The Chinese electronics manufacturer has been exploring various alternatives to Google’s Android OS after the Trump administration put the world’s second-largest smartphone maker on an ‘Entity List’ which may cut the company off from essential US components used for manufacturing, including Android.
“This is a pilot project. We see it as the first stage of launching the Russian OS on Huawei devices,” said one of Reuters’ two sources.
A spokeswoman for Huawei confirmed that they are in talks with the Russian Ministry of Communications, but did not elaborate.
Last week, Huawei said the U.S. trade restrictions could cut its smartphone unit’s revenue by about $10 billion this year.
Russia is discussing the use of Aurora OS on 360,000 Huawei tablets by August 2020.
“Huawei is interested in the project. It showed samples of tablets that could be used,” the second source said. Aurora is Russia’s only OS and is not currently being used.
Huawei is also racing to develop an operating system of its own in preparation for the worst-case scenario of being stripped of essential Google Android apps. –Reuters
Russia’s state-owned Rostelecom has an exclusive contract for the purchase of tablets to be used in the upcoming population census next October.
“Various options for collaboration with Huawei are currently being considered with participation of the Ministry of Communications… We don’t disclose details yet, there is an agreement on confidentiality,” Rostelcom told Reuters in a written statement.
In June, The Guardian reported that Huawei had struck a deal with Russian telecom giant MTS to develop a 5G network in Russia – an agreement reportedly signed on the sidelines of a meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LdueNP Tyler Durden
Is the prospect of looming global recession merely an economic matter, to be discussed within the framework of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 – which is to say, whether or not, the Central Bankers have wasted their available tools to manage it? Or, is there a wider pattern of geo-political markers that may be deduced ahead of its arrival?
Fortunately, we have some help. Adam Tooze is a prize-winning British historian, now at Columbia University, whose histories of WWII (The Wages of Destruction) – and of WWI (The Deluge) tell a story of 100 years of spiraling; ‘pass-the-parcel’ global debt; of recession (some ideologically impregnated) , and of export trade models, all of which have shaped our geo-politics. These are the same variables, of course, which happen to be very much in play today.
Tooze’s books describe the primary pattern of linked and repeating events over the two wars – yet there are other insights to be found within the primary pattern: How modes of politics were affected; how the idea of ‘empire’ metamorphosed; and how debt accumulations triggered profound shifts.
But first, as Tooze notes, the ‘pattern’ starts with Woodrow Wilson’s observation in 1916, that “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it”. Well, actually it was also about British élite fear of rivals (i.e. Germany arising), and the fear of Britain’s élites of appearing weak. Today, it is about the American élite fearing similarly, about China, and fearing a putative Eurasian ‘empire’.
The old European empires effectively ‘died’ in 1916, Tooze states: As WWI entered its third year, the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents simply could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States. By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory (equivalent to $560 billion in today’s money). It was also the year in which US output overtook that of the entire British Empire.
The other side to the coin was that staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production. And the same occurred again in 1940-41. Huge profits resulted. Oligarchies were founded; and America’s lasting interest in its outsize military-security complex was founded.
Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”
Of course, after the war – there was the debt. A lot of it. France “was deeply in debt, owing billions to the United States and billions more to Britain. France had been a lender during the conflict too, but most of its credits had been extended to Russia, which repudiated all its foreign debts after the Revolution of 1917. The French solution was to exact reparations from Germany”.
“Britain was willing to relax its demands on France. But it owed the United States even more than France did. Unless it collected from France—and from Italy and all the other smaller combatants as well—it could not hope to pay its American debts.”
“Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain. Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.”
Wars are frequently followed by economic downturns, but in 1920-21, US monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels through austerity. They engineered a depression. They did not wholly succeed, but they succeeded well enough. When the US opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard, an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match US deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own – and accept mass unemployment as the consequence – or devalue.
Britain actually chose the course of deflation and austerity. Pretty much everybody else however, chose to devalue their currency (relative to gold), instead. But American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. They did not want their industry and markets disturbed by a flood of cheap French and German products. In 1921 and 1923 – just as today in respect to China – America raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. “The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States”.
That way was found: (you can guess it) – more debt. Germany resorted to the printing press. (Printing money was the only way Germany could afford to rearm in anticipation of the WWII sequel to the First WW). The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers, however also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.
“Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy.”
Only the United States could fix it. It never did.
Why?
Because “[a]t the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system, there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future” [as global hegemon], Tooze opines.
The flip side to this fixation with a dollar “as good as gold” was not just the inter-war hardship of a war-ravaged Europe, but also the threat of American markets flooded with low-cost European imports: German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks. Such a situation also prevailed after World War II when the US acquiesced in the undervaluation of the Deutsche mark and yen precisely to aid German and Japanese recovery.
Fast forward to today – and here lies the root of Trump’s economic Zeitgeist. The US fear has returned in a new iteration: America’s global primacy is being overtaken, this time by China.
The austerity of the 1920s, and the depression that followed, eviscerated governments throughout Europe. Yet the dictatorships that replaced them were not, as Tooze emphasizes in The Wages of Destruction, reactionary absolutisms; rather, they aspired to be modernizers. And none more so, than Adolf Hitler. Tooze writes: “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.
Hitler dreamed of conquering Poland, Ukraine, and Russia as a means of gaining the resources to match those of the United States, Tooze argues. “The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American West”. Hitler’s original aim, Tooze suggests, was more that of a highly modernised and industrial first Reich – a Carolingian ‘empire’, such as that instigated by the Franks after the Fall of Rome.
Although configured differently, the German National Socialist dream of a ‘modern’ Caroligian empire still underpinsan EU vision of Europe today, as its lineal descendent.
After WWII, a weakened, and chastened Europe definitively turned away from raw ‘power’; or to put it a little differently, it moved beyond power towards a different style of ‘empire’. Still Carolingian in essence – that is, with a centralized command (in the Frankish style), overseeing a self-contained world of laws and rules and tightly regulated cooperation.
But, with the post-war ethos of ‘never again’, it evolved into a millenarian project, grounded in Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ – and of his ‘compelling’ logic of global governance as the only solution to the brutal politics of Hobbesian anarchy, (though Kant also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become “the most horrible despotism”).
So, Europe lives a “postmodern system” that does not rest on a balance of power, but on “the rejection of force” and on “self-enforced rules of behaviour”. In the “postmodern world,” wrote Robert Cooper (himself a senior EU official): “raison d’état and the amorality of Machiavelli’s theories of statecraft … have been replaced by a moral consciousness” in international affairs.
The result is a paradox. The US solved the ‘Kantian paradox’ for the EU of its Liberal rejection of power politics through providing security, which rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace, and neither have they needed power to preserve it.
It is precisely this paradox on which Trump has ‘zeroed-in’, in order to mobilise his base towards a new view of Europe, as a predatory trade rival. The US, faced by a rising China, is retrenching into a Hobbesian world where hard ‘power’ is paramount, and will thus be increasingly unsympathetic to European liberal, moral-concern narratives.
Here is the point: The EU initially would never have come into being, without America’s covert political engineering. And Europe was, (and still is), consequently founded on the premise of unreserved US benignity towards the EU. But that key premise no longer holds: Can a Europe on the cusp of recession successfully manage to balance away from a US now focused on trade war toward Eurasia?
What might a looming recession then portend? The pendulum will (almost certainly) now swing to the other extreme from the 1920s. Trump is a zero-interest, bail-out man. But this extreme swing in the opposite direction, however, is likely induce similar rounds of ‘daisy-chain’ sloughing-off of toxic debt onto someone – anyone – else; of competitive devaluation, and attempted deflation-export.
A substantive global recession may set the whole ‘crazy debt contraption’ in motion again. But this time, amplified by a collapsing oil price, toppling Middle Eastern states, etc. Everybody can see the system is crazy. The United States could fix it, but it never will.
It has weaponised the financial system so thoroughly that the US will never yield on the dollar status. The question is, do China and Russia have the political will – and capability – to assume the task of mounting a different financial order?
Why did the US not fix the system in the inter-war years? Because, Tooze tells us (in coded terms), the system had proved a gold-mine for the weapons-manufacturing oligarchs, and America was mightily taken with the unfolding prospect of its leading the world: the ‘American century’ ahead.
Also, before WWI, Tooze writes in The Deluge, the ability of the US to act was hindered by its ineffective political system; dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts.
“America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit”.
Well the two ‘world wars’ – as principal weapons’ provider – did not make that situation much better. Oligarchic fortunes and influence blossomed. The interwar years saw the intersection of certain oligarchic interests with that of organized crime in America, and WWII saw the linking of the Italian mafia into US foreign operations – and thus to the US political class.
In 1916, the US output surpassed that of the entire British Empire. Ninety-eight years later, US output supremacy (in PPP terms) came to an end. China surpassed America. Will a more fractured, increasingly belligerent US domestic polity be able to fix the financial order, as the latter careers from one extreme to a disordered, sanctioned and tariffed other? America most likely, will once again be wedded to a “conservative” [i.e. Hobbesian] vision of pursuing its own future.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZquVIB Tyler Durden
The report says China doesn’t currently supply the Hong Kong Police Force, but with the out of control civil unrest in the region, tear gas demand is expected to jump in the near term which could leave Chinese producers of the gas in an excellent position.
Mainland tear gas production began in the 1990s, and over the last decade, riot police have used tear gas in high-profile demonstrations, including protests in Wukan village in the southern province of Guangdong in 2011 and 2016.
Made-in-China tear gas has been exported to several countries abroad.
Thailand’s political crisis in 2012 forced the Royal Thai Police to fire Chinese tear gas canisters at protestors. The gas was even used during the Arab spring and at anti-government demonstrations in Sudan and Venezuela.
Analysts at Research & Markets believe the Chinese tear gas industry is likely to grow 7.4% between this year and 2025, generating around $811 million in market value over the six years.
The entire industry could be valued at $10 billion by 2022, according to a report by Allied Market Research, with China expected to be one of the hottest markets “due to strong economic growth, increased military expenditure, rapid industrial development, and growing civil unrest situations.”
Jinjian Police Equipment Manufacturing Company manufactured 20,000 tear gas hand grenades last year, according to a salesman named Han.
“Most clients are from home, but there were also foreign buyers and trading companies that eventually resold the goods abroad,” he said. “As far as I know, some of our grenades went to Algeria.”
Omega Research Foundation in 2014 said Chinese firms making crowd control weapons had quadrupled in the past decade to 134, with 48 offering products for export.
As part of a 2016 Chinese government acquisition process to supply the ministry with tear gas, 16 companies were chosen across the country to fulfill the orders. By 2018, 50 companies were bidding on contracts to provide the government with tear gas.
In the last several months, the increasing use of tear gas, rubber bullets, flashbangs, bean bag rounds, and pepper spray by the Hong Kong Police Force against anti-government protests have put Chinese firms into an excellent position to capitalize on the turmoil.
Hong Kong police have so far fired 1,800 rounds of tear gas this year, which it’s long-term supplier, Britain, pulled out of contracts in June over “concerns about human rights abuses.”
It’s “hugely problematic” that Hong Kong police fired tear gas from above crowds, an expert said, as seen here. “If it hits someone in the head, you could kill them,” said Jim Bueermann, former president of the Police Foundation in Washington. “I have never seen that before.” pic.twitter.com/sLsUnRO9RJ
Tear gas is banned from the modern battlefield but is permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention for domestic crowd control, which suggests that China could soon be exporting the gas to Hong Kong.
A saleswoman at state-owned Henan Ordnance Special Equipment Company, one of the 50 contracted tear gas suppliers, said there are some restrictions on exports.
“Foreign buyers have to provide a whole set of documents, like the end-users’ information and licenses, as well as relevant approvals from the Chinese police,” she said.
With China’s added capacity to make more tear gas coming online in the near term, it could soon supply Hong Kong as the political turmoil deepens.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2L8dxTK Tyler Durden
For their unorthodox views, some physicians are being treated as medical heretics. Google’s search engine algorithm has essentially ended traffic to their websites…
In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel “Fahrenheit 451,” firemen don’t put out fires; they create fires to burn books.
The totalitarians claim noble goals for book burning: They want to spare citizens unhappiness caused by having to sort through conflicting theories.
Censorship Is Control
The real aim of censorship, in Bradbury’s dystopia, is to control the population.
Captain Beatty explains to the protagonist fireman Montag, “You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.” The “house” Beatty is referring to is opinions in conflict with the “official” one.
“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it,” Bradbury wrote.
Nobel Laureate Copes With Conflicting Opinions
When making decisions, we often face conflicting theories. Daily, we face choices about what to eat. Although the government issues ever-changing dietary guidelines, thankfully, the marketplace supports personal dietary decisions ranging from carnivore to vegan. We are free to choose our diet based on our evaluation of the available evidence and the needs of our bodies.
When we face health issues, decisions become tougher. There is an orthodox opinion, and there are always dissenting opinions. For example, the orthodoxy recommends statins to reduce high cholesterol. Others believe high cholesterol isn’t a health risk and that statins are harmful.
Nobel laureate in economics Vernon Smith was taking a prescribed statin and recently observed the impact it was having on him:
“In the last week, I had a very clear (now) experience of temporary memory loss. I did a little searching and found this article summarizing and documenting the evidence over many years,” he wrote on Facebook.
Smith continues,
“Such incidents have been widely reported, but the problem did not arise in any of the clinical trials, but neither were they designed to detect it.”
Smith had to weigh the purported benefits against the side effects.
“Statin effectiveness in reducing heart/stroke events needs to be weighed against this important negative. Since I am actively writing, this is a primal concern for me, and I have stopped taking it.”
A free person understands that there is no one “best” pathway. Although experts have the knowledge, a free person takes responsibility, makes a choice, and bears the consequences. We never know what the consequences would have been had we made a different choice.
Health Care 451
Some people don’t like to take responsibility for health choices. They prefer to do what they’re told by the doctor.
“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared?” asks Bradbury’s character professor Faber in “Fahrenheit 451.” Faber responds to his own rhetorical question:
“Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.”
Bradbury is reminding us that life is messy. Often, there is no comfortable one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges we face.
Despite the evidence against statins, the medical orthodoxy would like you to believe that those who question statins are being hoodwinked by fake news. The orthodoxy wants you to believe there is one size for all.
Duke University’s Dr. Ann Marie Navar is the associate editor of JAMA Cardiology. In her article, “Fear-Based Medical Misinformation,” she rails against the “fake medical news and fearmongering [that] plague the cardiovascular world through relentless attacks on statins.”
She writes many patients remain concerned about statin safety. In one study, concerns about statin safety were the leading reason that patients reported declining a statin, with more than 1 in 3 patients (37 percent) citing fears about adverse effects as their reason for not starting a statin after their physician recommended it.
Dr. Navar takes the position that concerns about safety are “fake medical news,” spread in part by ignorant patients via social media. Don’t worry, she counsels, reports are incorrect when they claim “that statins cause memory loss, cataracts, pancreatic dysfunction, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and cancer.”
Fake news? Dr. David Brownstein (no relation) disagrees:
“The Physicians Desk Reference states that adverse reactions associated with Lipitor include cognitive impairment (memory loss, forgetfulness, amnesia, memory impairment, and confusion associated with statin use). Furthermore, post-marketing studies have found Lipitor use associated with pancreatitis. Other researchers have reported a relationship between statin use and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Finally, peer-reviewed research has reported a relationship between statin use and cataracts. Statins being associated with serious adverse effects has nothing to do with fake news. These are facts,” he writes.
To be sure, more physicians would agree with Navar than Brownstein, but should treatments be dictated by those on one side of the argument? After all, due to human variability, statins may both save some lives and impair or kill other people.
Can you imagine a future government-controlled health care system, completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry, mandating statins for everyone? I can.
There are good reasons to be concerned that we are losing access to information with which to evaluate opposing sides of health issues, like the statin debate. Already Google is “burning” sites that question the medical orthodoxy about statins.
Google Tips the Scales
Mercola.com, operated by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is one of the most visited websites providing alternative views to medical orthodoxy. If I were researching statins, I would certainly read several of the essays questioning statin use and the cholesterol theory of heart disease. Essays at Mercola.com usually provide references to medical studies. Personally, since Mercola sells supplements and I am a supplement skeptic, I read his essays—like I read all medical essays—with a grain of salt.
“Although I was trained to think that antidepressants are to the depressed (and to the anxious, panicked, OCD, IBS, PTSD, bulimic, anorexic, and so on) what eyeglasses are to the poor-sighted, I no longer buy into this bill of goods” she writes.
For their unorthodox views, Brogan, Mercola, and others like them are treated as medical heretics. Brogan and Mercola havedocumented how a change in Google’s search engine algorithm has destroyed search traffic to their websites.
From time to time, Google updates algorithms determining how search results are displayed; there is nothing inherently nefarious in such actions. Google has achieved its market position by doing a better job than other search engines.
“Google search results were based on crowdsource relevance. An article would ascend in rank based on the number of people who clicked on it.”
After its June 19 algorithm update, Google is relying more on human “quality” raters. Google instructs raters that the lowest ratings should go to a “YMYL page with inaccurate potentially dangerous medical advice.” YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life.”
“We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low-quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact users’ happiness, health, financial stability, or safety,” Google writes.
Does that sound reasonable? If a site argues for treatments other than the medical orthodoxy then, by definition, the site can arouse readers’ cause for concern and, for some people, unhappiness. Do we really want Google to assume the role of Bradbury’s firemen?
Google wants to protect you from conflicting opinions. And if you don’t think that’s a problem, imagine sometime in the future when searching for information on monetary policy, you only find results for Modern Monetary Theory.
Google thinks its intention to “do the right thing” is enough to prevent abuses; some Google employees would disagree.
Google Plays Happiness Doctor
Google isn’t eliminating access to alternative health pages; it’s making it harder to find them. Typical health searches will still generate plenty of “facts,” just not conflicting facts. In “Fahrenheit 451,” Beatty explains the government’s strategy: “Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.”
Instead of “conflicting theory,” Beatty explains the strategy is to “cram” the people “full of noncombustible data, chock them so … full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.”
Filled with “facts,” Beatty explains, people will “feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.” He assures Montag that his fireman role is noble. Firemen are helping to keep the world happy.
“The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now.”
The only way Google will maintain its dominance is to continue to meet the needs of consumers. Whether Google continues to “burn” websites is up to us. Google will continue to sort out unorthodox views as long as “we” the consumer continue to rely on Google’s search engine.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/327SF5M Tyler Durden
The threshold to an armed conflict around the Persian Gulf just got even smaller.
On Monday, Iran said it had deployed two warships – a destroyer and a helicopter carrier – to protect the country’s commercial vessels around the Gulf of Aden, located between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, and Persian Gulf region amid a growing US-driven military build-up in the volatile region, which recently culminated with several tanker seizures on both sides, the navy times reports.
Iran’s brand new destroyer Sahand and the supply ship/replenishment carrier Kharg whiuch has a helicopter pad and services as lositics support, were deployed to the Gulf of Aden and Sea of Oman and tasked with escorting ships in international waters.
The “Sahand” commissioned in December 2018, is Iran’s most advanced home-made warship. It has a stealth hull and can travel a further than the previous class destroyers without refueling. It is equipped with surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles as well as anti-aircraft batteries and radar and radar evading capabilities.
Iranian naval forces attend a Dec. 1 inauguration ceremony for the destroyer Sahand, in Bandar Abbas, Iran
Tehran’s decision to escort its cargo vessels comes at a time of escalating tensions in the Gulf, with US and UK warships operating in and around the Persian Gulf under the “defensive” premise that Iran is the aggressor behind June’s attacks on two tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Accusing Tehran of ‘sponsoring terrorism’ and running a secret nuclear program, Washington has beefed up its military in the region with more troops and hardware, including an aircraft carrier and bombers.
In early July, the Iranian tanker Adrian Darya, previously known as Grace 1, was seized off the coast of Gibraltar for allegedly carrying oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions. It was later released, despite US demands that it be detained again. In retaliation, Iran detained a British oil tanker in the Persian Gulf; it remains in Tehran’s custody.
The United States’ most devoted ally in Europe, the UK, is the only country, so far, to support Trump’s call for an international anti-Iran armada in the region. It has sent three new warships to reinforce its presence there in recent weeks, with the stated goal of protecting shipping lanes.
Meanwhile, after Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif made a surprise appearance at the G-7 summit in Biarritz over the weekend where he failed to achieve any notable diplomatic breakthroughs, he then darted off to Beijing, where he met with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing. This was s the third time the Iranian FM has visited China this year, as the Iranian tries to reinforce Chinese support of Iran in its conflict with the US.
Iran and China need to join forces to counter unilateralism and “contempt for international law,” Zarif told his Chinese counterpart at a meeting in Beijing on Monday. WHile Zarif did not mention the U.S. directly in opening remarks to Wang Yi at a state guesthouse, he appeared to be referencing the administration of President Donald Trump.
China has been a close Iranian economic partner and is among the signatories to the 2015 nuclear accord, which has been unraveling since President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement.
“Unilateralism is on the rise. Rejection of international law, not just lack of respect for international law but in fact contempt for international law, is on the rise and we need to work together,” Zarif said, after making an impromptu five-hour visit Sunday to the seaside resort of Biarritz, where he met with French President Emmanuel Macron and French, German and British diplomats.
He said he planned to brief Wang on “the latest developments as well as my tour of Europe and my discussions in Biarritz with our French colleagues” in the nuclear agreement.
Wang said in his opening remarks that “unilateralism is rising and power politics is emerging. Facing this situation, China as a responsible country agrees to work with Iran and other countries to work together for multilateralism, the basic rules of international politics and uphold the rightful interests of each country.”
During his trip to China, which has emerged as an obvious ally in Iran’s feud with Trump, Zarif was said to focus on security in the Strait of Hormuz. It is unclear if he was successful, however if one more Chinese warships unexpectedly appear in the Persian Gulf, we will know the answer.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZjZsMM Tyler Durden
Computer models of the climate are at the heart of calls to ban the cheap, reliable energy that powers our thriving economy and promotes healthier, longer lives. For decades, these models have projected dramatic warming from small, fossil-fueled increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, with catastrophic consequences.
Yet, the real-world data aren’t cooperating. They show only slight warming, mostly at night and in winter. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there has been no systematic increase in the frequency of extreme weather events, and the ongoing rise in sea level that began with the end of the ice age continues with no great increase in magnitude. The constancy of land-based records is obvious in data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Should we trust these computer models of doom? Let’s find out by comparing the actual temperatures since 1979 with what the 32 families of climate models used in the latest U.N. report on climate science predicted they would be.
Atmospheric scientist John Christy developed a global temperature record of the lower atmosphere using highly accurate satellite soundings. NASA honored him for this achievement, and he was an author for a previous edition of the U.N. report. He told a House Science Committee hearing in March 2017 that the U.N. climate models have failed badly.
Christy compared the average model projections since 1979 to the most reliable observations — those made by satellites and weather balloons over the vast tropics. The result? In the upper levels of the lower atmosphere, the models predictedseven times as much warming as has been observed. Overprediction also occurred at all other levels. Christy recently concluded that, on average, the projected heating by the models is three times what has been observed.
This is a critical error. Getting the tropical climate right is essential to understanding climate worldwide. Most of the atmospheric moisture originates in the tropical ocean, and the difference between surface and upper atmospheric temperature determines how much of the moisture rises into the atmosphere. That’s important. Most of earth’s agriculture is dependent upon the transfer of moisture from the tropics to temperate regions.
Christy is not looking at surface temperatures, as measured by thermometers at weather stations. Instead, he is looking at temperatures measured from calibrated thermistors carried by weather balloons and data from satellites. Why didn’t he simply look down here, where we all live? Because the records of the surface temperatures have been badly compromised.
Globally averaged thermometers show two periods of warming since 1900: a half-degree from natural causes in the first half of the 20th century, before there was an increase in industrial carbon dioxide that was enough to produce it, and another half-degree in the last quarter of the century.
The latest U.N. science compendium asserts that the latter half-degree is at least half manmade. But the thermometer records showed that the warming stopped from 2000 to 2014. Until they didn’t.
In two of the four global surface series, data were adjusted in two ways that wiped out the “pause” that had been observed.
The first adjustment changed how the temperature of the ocean surface is calculated, by replacing satellite data with drifting buoys and temperatures in ships’ water intake. The size of the ship determines how deep the intake tube is, and steel ships warm up tremendously under sunny, hot conditions. The buoy temperatures, which are measured by precise electronic thermistors, were adjusted upwards to match the questionable ship data. Given that the buoy network became more extensive during the pause, that’s guaranteed to put some artificial warming in the data.
The second big adjustment was over the Arctic Ocean, where there aren’t any weather stations. In this revision, temperatures were estimated from nearby land stations. This runs afoul of basic physics.
Even in warm summers, there’s plenty of ice over much of the Arctic Ocean. Now, for example, when the sea ice is nearing its annual minimum, it still extends part way down Greenland’s east coast. As long as the ice-water mix is well-stirred (like a glass of ice water), the surface temperature stays at the freezing point until all the ice melts. So, extending land readings over the Arctic Ocean adds nonexistent warming to the record.
Further, both global and United States data have been frequently adjusted. There is nothing scientifically wrong with adjusting data to correct for changes in the way temperatures are observed and for changes in the thermometers. But each serial adjustment has tended to make the early years colder, which increases the warming trend. That’s wildly improbable.
In addition, thermometers are housed in standardized instrument shelters, which are to be kept a specified shade of white. Shelters in poorer countries are not repainted as often, and darker stations absorb more of the sun’s energy. It’s no surprise that poor tropical countries show the largest warming from this effect.
All this is to say that the weather balloon and satellite temperatures used in Christy’s testimony are the best data we have, and they show that the U.N.’s climate models just aren’t ready for prime time.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NEUKlI Tyler Durden
