Tag: news

The notion that Google’s search algorithm is biased (explicitly or implicitly) against conservative voices and media outlets is nothing new. President Trump slammed Google for this tendency over the summer when he tweeted a screen shot of the results from a search using the terms “Trump news”…

…and it came back with only left-leaning news organizations in the top spots.

So it’s hardly surprising that, according to a late Thursday report by the Wall Street Journal, two tech reporters exposed an incident where Google employees considered actively biasing the company’s search algorithm to favor news sources that would offer the perspective that Trump’s then-newly issued travel ban was unconstitutional, illegal and dangerous, while also surfacing links to resource and information that would allow users to contribute to the ACLU or other organizations working against the ban, while also providing resources for people impacted by the ban.

The list of suggestions included:

“Actively counter islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc.”

“Actively counter prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.”

“Can we launch an ephemeral experience that includes Highlights, up-to-date info from the US State Dept, DHS, links to donate to ACLU, etc?” the email added.

Several officials responded favorably to the overall idea. “We’re absolutely in…Anything you need,” one wrote.

But a public-affairs executive wrote: “Very much in favor of Google stepping up, but just have a few questions on this,” including “how partisan we want to be on this.”

“To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave Highlights access to organizations that support a certain view of the world in a time of political conflict,” the public-affairs executive said. “Is that accurate? If so, would we be willing to open access to highlights to [organizations] that…actually support the ban?”

While these suggestions were being bandied about, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who moved to the US from the former Soviet Union as a child, was attending rallies in the Bay Area protesting the ban. Google also joined nearly 100 technology companies in filing a joint amicus brief that February challenging the ban. “The order inflicts significant harm on American business, innovation, and growth.”

According to the email chain, which was leaked to WSJ, employees responsible for search marketing said they were engaged in a “large brainstorm” about how to react to the search.

“Overall idea: Leverage search to highlight important organizations to donate to, current news, etc. to keep people abreast of how they can help as well as the resources available for immigrations [sic] or people traveling,” the email says. Some suggested ways to “actively counter” Google searches that produced anti-Islamic and anti-Hispanic search results. Others focused on how the company could use its “highlights” function, the code name for an experimental project that allowed influencers like politicians and musicians to post text updates that would appear directly in Google’s search feed.

A spokesperson for Google emphasized in a statement that none of these ideas was ever implemented, and that “Google has never manipulated its search results” – which is, of course, objectively untrue. In fact, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to meet with states’ attorneys general next week to discuss possible criminal action against tech firms that bias their products against conservatives.

“These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology – not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump’s executive order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.”

Because who could ever forgot how Trump’s electoral victory caused such “panic and dismay” among top Google executive, after the company actively aided the Clinton campaign only to find that its vast influence on the culture still wasn’t enough to push her over the line.

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The global bond rout accelerated overnight, when Japan surprised the market – which had been already on edge over the BOJ’s tightening intentions – with an announcement to further “stealth taper” its QE by trimming its buying of bonds due in more than 25 years by 10 billion yen ($88.9 million), from 60 to 50 billion yen at its regular operation on Friday, the bank’s first reduction in the segment since July.

The announcement sent local long-term bond yields climbing close to just shy of the highest levels since the central bank introduced its negative interest-rate policy in January 2016. The yield on 10-year JGB bonds climbed 1.5 bps to 0.13%, the highest level since Aug. 3, after trading 0.5bps before the BOJ announcement

The move was most pronounced among the longest duration Japanese bonds, the 40Y JGB maturity, which firmly broke above the 1% resistance level, rising to 1.05%, the highest since November.

The “super-long” sector for Japanese bonds is favored by institutional investors, and especially pension funds who are seen as major buyers of 40-year debt, life insurers are among the largest holders of 20- and 30-year zones. And as Bloomberg notes, the 1 percent level for the super-long zones is seen as critical in prompting these long-term investors to shift some money back into the yen from higher-yielding overseas debt.

The 30-year yield rose four basis points to 0.89 percent, while that on 20-year debt increased 2.5 basis points to 0.645 percent.

JGB volatility spiked in July after the BOJ said it would tolerate a wider band of fluctuations in the benchmark yield and allow more flexibility in bond operations, allowing the 10Y yield to rise as high as 0.20% in an attempt to steepen the yield curve and provide some comfort for struggling local banks, even as it continues to push forward with its extraordinary monetary easing. On July 31, the BOJ said that it will allow the 10-year yield to deviate by as much as 0.2% points around zero percent.

Earlier this week, governor Kuroda on Wednesday kept the BOJ’s monetary policy unchanged and reaffirmed its commitment to reaching 2 percent inflation. Meanwhile, the re-election as party leader of PM Abe – who appointed Kuroda to head the BOJ in 2013 – will ultimately serve as an endorsement of his mix of monetary easing, regulatory reform and fiscal flexibility.

Yet even with the de facto tightening, the Japanese yen ignored Friday’s tapering move, dropping to a two-month low versus the dollar and the USDJPY rising as high as 112.87, as the Topix index rallied to the highest level since May in the footsteps of the furious rally that has gripped global stocks in recent days.

Commenting on the move, Mitsubishi UFJ’s Naomi Muguruma said that “the BOJ’s action is in line with the policy of conducting market operations more flexibly and is aimed at improving market activity, not at raising yield levels. The move also comes in light of a supply/demand balance as government bond issuance in the super-long zone is reduced this year.”

The rise in Japanese yields joined a global selloff in U.S. Treasuries, which overnight traded at 3.08% – one of the highest levels in recent years – and German bunds, ahead of another interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve next week. The European Central Bank this month confirmed it will cut bond-buying in half next month and anticipates that new purchases will be halted by the end of the year.

While Friday’s surprising announcement will bolster speculation that the BOJ is seeking to intentionally guide yields higher, many investors do not see the advance in Japanese yields sustaining as they see authorities carrying on with the ultra-loose monetary policy indefinitely, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s winning his third straight three-year term as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Thursday took him a step closer to becoming the country’s longest-serving premier.

“The BOJ’s move Friday confirmed market views that it will continue to gradually reduce buying in super-long maturities as it looks sustain its easy policy for a while with Abe government continuing,” said Akio Kato of Mitsubishi UFJ Kokusai Asset Management in Tokyo. “The longer-yields have reacted but their moves are contained within the levels of steepening anticipated under the BOJ’s latest tweaks.”

In an attempt to encourage curve steepening, earlier in the month the central bank raised purchases of short-tenor notes this month to offset a cut in frequency of operations for those maturities.

Still some said this may be too much ado about nothing:  “We shouldn’t read too much into each operation as it is conducted within the policy mandate” of being more flexible, said Muguruma of Mitsubishi UFJ.

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Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

With Saudi Arabia forever escalating their war in Yemen, the growing calls by human rights groups to stop selling them arms with which to commit war crimes are struggling to compete with the vast sums of money the Saudis are offering for those arms.

Germany is the latest to renege on promises to ban weapons sales for use in the Yemen War, announcing Wednesday that the Economy Minister has greenlit a new round of artillery systems for sale to the Saudis.

However, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, even though the Saudi-led coalition is using advanced western warplanes and precision guided munitions in its aerial campaign over Yemen, innocent civilians are still ending up in the crosshairs. Around 10,000 people are thought to have perished in the conflict so far, two thirds of them civilians, according to the UN. The fighting and a partial blockade has also left 22 million people in need of aid and the situation could deteriorate even further depending on the outcome of the assault on the coastal city of Hudaydah. It is a vital port for humanitarian aid and severing that flow could put hundreds of thousands more people at risk of starvation.

Reliable statistics about the conflict in Yemen are notoriously difficult to come by. A non-profit organization called The Yemen Data Project has been monitoring airstrikes by the Saudi coalition and their findings help build a picture of the scale of the air campaign. There have been around 17,000 airstrikes in total since March 2015, the following infographic provides an overview of some of the targets struck. While around 3,400 military sites have been hit, residential areas have been targeted on 1,543 occasions. There have been 70 airstrikes on medical facilities, along with 266 on educational institutions and 45 on mosques.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Ditz notes, the systems are designed for precise counterattack, and are clearly being bought explicitly to use in Yemen.

Yet the Merkel government, as part of its coalition deal, announced a full export ban to “any sides fighting in Yemen,” including the Saudis.

While this was at the time supposed to be a condition of the Social Democrats joining the government. So far, Merkel has not explained why the sale was approved over the putative ban, and the Social Democrats have not complained either.

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Denmark has for decades maintained a reputation as one of Europe’s most cleanest and most credit-worthy countries. But that reputation now lies in tatters thanks to the widening scandal involving the country’s largest lender, Danske Bank, and allegations that it blithely aided shadowy criminals from the Soviet Union by helping them launder money through Danske’s branch in Estonia.

An internal audit published Wednesday by Danish law firm Bruun & Hjejle only exacerbated the situation by revealing that the potential for fraud was even larger than authorities initially believed – with a total of $234 billion in transactions now labeled “suspicious” by the bank. Denmark’s government, which is presently investigating the bank along with authorities in Estonia and the US, revealed that the bank is potentially facing as much as 4 billion kroner ($630 million) in fines, according to Bloomberg. That sum is many multiples of Estonia’s GDP.

Danske officials estimated at the time that they had done business with some 6,200 “suspicious” clients between 2007 and 2015, when the bulk of the alleged money laundering occurred.

That would be tantamount to the largest fine ever levied by Danish authorities, which is understandable, since the Danske scandal is one of the largest money laundering cases in European history. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates Danske may have to pay more than 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) in total.

This could have a serious impact on the bank’s financial health, which could be hugely problematic for Danes because the bank holds one-third of all deposits in the country. Indeed, the scandal could have far-reaching ramifications for the entire Danish financial system and Danish companies as S&P has warned that the case might impact Denmark’s AAA credit score. Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Leichtenstein and Luxembourg also have AAA ratings from S&P in Europe.

According to EU Observer, Danish authorities began  seriously investigating the allegations only after a whistleblower, and investigative reporters, shed light on it last year. These revelations followed warnings from Estonian, US and Russian authorities. Yet the bank refused to act on the warnings as now-former CEO Thomas Borgen, who resigned earlier this week, brushed them aside. Before ascending to the top job, Borgen was in charge of the bank’s international business, and the Estonia branch was a crucial locus of profits. Borgen said at a board meeting in 2010 that he did not “come across anything that could give rise to concern,” according to meeting minutes released by the bank on Wednesday.

To save face, the bank pledged €200 million ($235 billion) to create an anti-money laundering foundation in Denmark and Estonia that will “serve only subsidiaries of our Nordic customers and international customers with a solid Nordic footprint.” Meanwhile, Danish Trade Minister Rasmus Jarlov on Wednesday said he would begin drafting “significantly sharper” penalties for money laundering.

According to the internal audit, Bruun & Hjejle said many of the transactions originated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and some may have involved “members of the Putin family.” 

Since the scandal first surfaced earlier this year, Danske bank shares have tumbled 35%.

And if S&P moves through with the downgrade, or the US Treasury Department hints that it may be considering sanctions that would ban Danske from handling dollars – a punishment known as “the death penalty” – that selloff could get much, much worse.

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Authored by Kai Weiss via The Austrian Economics Center,

This week we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘Bruges Speech,’ where she put forward her vision for the future of the Europe. In our new study 30 years after Bruges: Margaret Thatcher’s Vision for Europe Revisited, we have looked at what we can still learn from the former British Prime Minister. 

Download the study here, and read a summary below:

Europe is today in the midst of a debate on the future of the European Union. It is not the first one: back before the Maastricht Treaty was passed in 1992, political leaders were discussing as well about where the EU, or as it was called back then, the European Community, was heading. Should it go the way of the “ever closer union,” or revert back to the fundamental principles? There was a split going through Europe on questions like this.

This was the situation in which the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found herself on September 20, 1988, when she stepped in front of a crowd at the College of Europe in Bruges.

“I decided that the time had come to strike out against what I saw the erosion of democracy by centralization and bureaucracy, and to set out an alternative view of Europe’s future,” she would later write in her memoirs The Downing Street Years.

The result was today’s infamous yet magnificent ‘Bruges speech,’ which was far from being anti-EU, but a stark warning against Brussels, an attempt to save the EU in the wake of federalists demanding more and more integration. This week, we are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of this speech. And, as it turns out, it has stood the test of time shockingly well. Indeed, many of the warnings that Thatcher put forth are even truer today (which you can read in our new study).

The European Heritage

In Thatcher’s vision, the European heritage is of crucial importance. She tries to teach us that Europe can be proud of its history. While wars did play too big of a role in the past, Europe is still the continent in which the ideal of individual liberty prevailed before anywhere else. It is the continent which brought forth many of the greatest innovations, artistic pieces, literary works, and intellectuals the world has ever seen.

Great Britain has played an instrumental part in the European story, Thatcher makes clear:

“Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.”

Britain has contributed mightily to European history and its values with the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and many other major steps on the path to freedom. But so has Britain benefitted from its link to mainland Europe, for instance having “borrowed that concept of the rule of law which marks out a civilized society from barbarism.”

This special relationship, says Thatcher, must be retained. Today this is even truer: on the eve of Brexit, it is of the utmost importance to keep this mutual understanding between the two sides intact, regardless of whether Britain is in- or outside of the EU.

Despite the millennia-long European history of (much) success, we need to remember that it is the long history of Europe, not the EU (the latter being only sixty years old):

“Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.”

Not everyone who criticizes the EU is automatically anti-European – an important point in today’s world in which Europe and the EU are most of the time used synonymously.

Rather, the European Union is a tool which can be used to promote the values Europeans defended so often in the twentieth century: the EU “is not an end in itself,” but rather “a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people.”

A Europe of Free Enterprise and Free Trade

What is the way to future prosperity? For Thatcher, it is “to deregulate and remove the constraints on trade.” It means “action to free markets, action to widen choice, action to reduce government intervention.” Instead of increasing centralization and regulatory efforts, Europe should remain a champion of free enterprise.  History – and the Soviet Union, should be enough proof that centralized decision-making doesn’t work.

The EU should not only be pro-trade to the inside, however. Instead, it should be globally oriented: “Europe never would have prospered and never will prosper as a narrow-minded, inward-looking club,” she warned. Free trade with the outside world – something that the EU is lacking behind to this day (while forcing all member states to comply with its trade policy), is one of the most important competences of Brussels: “we must ensure that our approach to world trade is consistent with the liberalisation we preach at home.”

For this, a strong relationship with America is needed.

For Margaret Thatcher, the U.S. was indeed to a certain extent part of Europe, “in the sense that she shares a common heritage of civilised values and a love of liberty.”

It is a natural fit between the two sides of the Atlantic, since the core values are shared with one another. In the face of today’s trade wars and aggressions on both sides, it would be all the worse if this relationship would be squandered in just a few months’ time.

Against Eurotopia

If there is any argument which the Prime Minister hit home continuously, it was her stark opposition to a centralized federal state, ruled by the Brussels bureaucracy. The idea of a United States of Europe is a utopia that “never comes, because we know we should not like it if it did.” Instead of politicians trying to create a single European identity, the mantra should be unity in diversity:

“Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.”

In Margaret Thatcher’s opinion, the EU should stay a supranational organization which is based on voluntary cooperation between sovereign states, rather than one federal state. She perhaps felt alone with this opinion when she presented it thirty years ago. But today, with another debate on the future of the European Union – and even farther down the road of the “ever closer union,” we should keep in mind what Lady Thatcher said, and “to raise the flag of national sovereignty, free trade and free enterprise – and fight.”

Indeed, as the Prime Minister wrote in her memoirs, “if there was ever an idea whose time had come and gone it was surely that of the artificial mega-state.”

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Figures released today by Eurostat have revealed a concentration of the European Union’s scientists and engineers in the UK and Germany.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, combined, the two countries are home to 38 percent while at the same time only accounting for 29 percent of the EU’s total population.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Conversely, France and Italy have 25 percent of the total population but only 16 percent of the scientists and engineers, but Italy stands out among the larger populations with just a 6% share of the EU’s scientists and engineers, while representing 12% of the EU’s total population – a serious brain drain.

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Authored by Ahmed Charai via The Gatestone Institute,

• Ambassador John Bolton was prescient in his 1998 warning, when the formation of body was first being debated in Rome, that it would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.

• The reconciliation commissions of South Africa and Morocco aimed to rehabilitate victims, and pay compensation for state outrages against them. That method would be a better model for Africa than a court funded and run from Europe.

• The International Criminal Court is a noble ideal but a flawed institution. Far better to encourage nations to develop courts that are accountable to the victims and free from charges of selective enforcement or foreign intervention.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. (Image source: United Nations/Flickr)

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is “already dead to us” National Security Adviser John Bolton told the Federalist Society recently. The U.S. will, he said, resist the court “by any means necessary.”

Why would the Trump Administration take such a hard line against “the world’s court of last resort”? Founded in 2002, in the wake of the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides and mass rapes, the international body was supposed to try evildoers who would otherwise escape justice due to broken legal systems in failed states.

Opposing the court is not a new position for the U.S. or Ambassador Bolton. The Bush Administration refused to sign the court’s implementing treaty in 2003, contending that it would lead to trials of U.S. soldiers and spies by a politically turbo-charged body located in Europe. At the time, many European leaders opposed President Bush’s war in Iraq and questioned its actions in the war on terror, including rendition and holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. Ambassador Bolton was even more prescient. He warned, in 1998, when the formation of body was first being debated in Rome, that it would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.

Now, U.S. soldiers may face charges for activities in Afghanistan. While the U.S. is not a signatory of the treaty, Afghanistan is, and the court claims jurisdiction over any actions taken there. If the ICC begins prosecuting American “war crimes” abroad, commanders will temper their battle plans, soldiers will become gun-shy and civilians will refuse to serve. America’s sovereign right to defend itself will be weakened. Israel is also expected to be another target, as the Palestinian Authority has agreed to the court’s jurisdiction and has already requested a probe.

In practice, the International Criminal Court is a failed experiment.

Its trials appear selective and political. While the court has received more than 10,000 written complaints referring to 139 countries, according to the London-based Africa Research Centre, it has focused its prosecutions exclusively on sub-Saharan Africans. Of the 10 investigations in progress, nine relate to African leaders or rebel leaders. (The only non-African case was against Serbian extremists.) This leads to the all-too-easy accusation that the court is racist, neo-colonialist or, in the words of one African writer, “white justice for black Africans.” Following a 2013 African Union summit, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn denounced the court as a “racial hunt”. While these charges are hyperbolic, the court’s selective prosecutions have undermined its credibility among Africans.

The ICC has also not been successful in Africa. The court’s first chief prosecutor, Luis Ocampo, pledged to indict and try the leaders of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan terror group linked to slaughter, rape and kidnapping, by the end of 2005. The LRA’s leaders have yet to face justice. Almost a decade ago, the court indicted Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir. No trial has occurred and Bashir continues to travel freely to Arab and African states that have signed the ICC’s implementing treaty. The court has not delivered on its promise to bring justice to people who have none.

As a result, African nations are pulling out. South Africa, Burundi, Gambia have voted to withdraw from the ICC and other African states are joining the stampede for the exit.

The ICC likes to refer to itself as the world’s court, but it represents fewer and fewer of world’s nations. The U.S., Israel, China and Russia have refused to ratify the court’s implementing Treaty of Rome. The African Union itself has openly criticized the ICC and debated leaving the court’s jurisdiction en masse.

The court’s leaders have, in addition, not held themselves to particularly high standards. Chief prosecutor Ocampo, defended his use of offshore bank accounts by saying that his salary was insufficient. Such a remark hardly inspires confidence.

Even worse for the court’s credibility are the allegations brought by David Nyekorach Matsanga, president of the Pan-African Forum, that Silvia Fernández de Gurmendi, the ICC’s president, allegedly received illegal sums totaling some $17 million between 2004 and 2015. These payments, Matsanga said, were to bribe prosecution witness against Sudan’s president. A court spokesman dismissed Matsanga’s evidence as a falsified invoice and unverified bank records. (Matsanga is no angel. He was spokesman for the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army in the 1990s.) Still, the evidence deserves an impartial review.

The International Criminal Court is a noble ideal but a flawed institution. Far better to encourage nations to develop courts that are accountable to the victims and free from charges of selective enforcement or foreign intervention. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Moroccan’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission — a government body subject to oversight by the people’s representatives — have heard hard cases and delivered judgements respected across the political spectrum. The two institutions aimed to rehabilitate victims, and pay compensation for state outrages against them.

That method would be a better model for Africa than a court funded and run from Europe.

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Scientists are concerned about the next significant “space weather” event, which begins at the sun in the center of the solar system. Severe space weather occurs less frequently than traditional weather on Earth but can be more destructive in nature.

The sun is now headed towards a solar minimum, forecasted to arrive in 2019 as the Sun changes over from Solar Cycle 24 to Solar Cycle 25. The Sun goes through 11-year cycles, during which solar activity increases and decreases.

Tracking sunspot activity dates back to the start of the first solar cycle in 1755. Today, simple sketching and counting of sunspot numbers have given way to land-based and space-based technologies that continuously monitor the Sun.

Scientists have discovered that intense activity such as sunspots and solar flares generally subside during a solar minimum. Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during a solar minimum, that does not mean the sun becomes dull.

He said solar activity simply changes.

For instance, Pesnell warned, “during a solar minimum, we can see the development of long-lived coronal holes.”

Coronal holes are large regions in the sun’s atmosphere where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows streams of solar particles known as coronal mass ejection (CME) to escape the sun as fast solar wind.

If the coronal hole is Earth-facing, then electrically charged particles from the Sun slam into Earth’s magnetic field and cause intense electromagnetic storms around the planet. The impact of these particles on the electronic infrastructure underlying modern industrial civilization can be devastating, said the Financial Times.

CMEs disrupt GPS, satellites, and astronauts currently in space. Even airline crew and passengers get a markedly higher dose of radiation during solar storms, especially during polar-crossing, trans-oceanic flights.

And a repeat of the most significant solar storm on record, the 1859 Carrington Super-flare, would cost trillions of dollars in damage as power grids, communication networks, and electronic equipment worldwide would be knocked out.

Some scientists believe that Earth is due for a severe space weather event that could send civilization temporarily into reverse.

Another incident occurred in 1989, when an Earth-facing CME rocked the planet, producing a surge in voltage that caused Hydro-Québec power grid in Canada to collapse, leaving millions of people without electricity.

“During a big geomagnetic storm in 2003, a Japanese scientific satellite was lost and 10 percent of the world’s satellite fleet suffered malfunctions,” said Professor Richard Horne of the British Antarctic Survey.

“Today we have around 1,500 satellites in orbit, with thousands more due to be launched in the next few years,” Prof Horne adds. “People are trying to use more commercial off-the-shelf components, rather than components made to operate in space, and many systems have not been tested in a major storm, so there is a lot of uncertainty about what might happen.”

A recent space weather event in late April 2017, allegedly knocked out power grids across the entire country in one simultaneous fashion. San Fransisco, New York, and Los Angeles were the three main areas affected. Each region experienced challenges or shutdowns in basic infrastructure such as communication networks and mass transportation.

An unfortunate coincidence of adverse space and Earth weather came in September 2017, when space storms disrupted shortwave radios for hours — preventing emergency response to hurricanes tearing apart the Caribbean.

“The Sun’s been very quiet for the last 10 years. It reminds people not to be complacent,” said Mike Hapgood, head of space weather at the UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Scientists tell the Financial Times that satellites can monitor potentially troublesome activity on the sun days ahead of a possible eruption, forecasting the path and effects of an actual CME, well, that is very difficult. If the CME is Earth-facing it takes about 24-hours to arrive, so when the next big solar flare comes racing towards Earth, government officials do not have enough time to prepare the nation or even the world for impact — it would be devastating.

According to Prof Horne, the most notable satellite for short-term space weather forecasting today is the US Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, launched into low-Earth Orbit (LEO) in 2015. From this tactical position about 1m miles from Earth, DSCOVR provides an early warning of about one hour before impact.

In late 2016, the Obama administration quietly passed an executive order titled “Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events,” which prepares the fragile nation for economic collapse from a space weather event. The mainstream media, for a good reason, were not allowed to cover the passage of this executive order because it would cause too much panic among the American people. When the next significant solar event strikes, most will not be prepared — not even government.

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Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,

What is the bigger story? The West Against the Rest or The West Against Itself?

The Illiberal Quartet of Xi, Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan is in the line of fire of haughty homilies about Western “values.”

Illiberalism is arrogantly and provocatively depicted in the West repeatedly as a Tartar Invasion 2.0. But closer to home Illiberalism is responsible for the social, civil war in the U.S. as Trump’s America has long ago forgotten what the European Enlightenment was all about.

The Western view is a maelstrom of a Judaeo-Greco-Roman, pseudo-philosophy steeped in Hegel, Toynbee, Spengler and obscure biblical references decrying an Asian attack on the “enlightened” West’s mission civilisatrice.

The maelstrom stunts critical thinking to evaluate Xi’s Confucianism, Putin’s Eurasianism, Rouhani’s realpolitik and “non-Westoxified” Shi’ite Islam, as well as Erdogan’s quest to guide the global Muslim Brotherhood.

Targets of the West.

Instead the West give us phony “analyses” of how NATO should be praised for not allowing Libya to become a Syria, which it indeed has.

Meanwhile a golden rule prevails about one Asian power: never criticize the House of Saud, which happens to be the ultimate manifestation of Illiberalism.

They get a free pass because after all they are “our bastards.”

What the illiberal-bashing frenzy does accomplish is to reduce what should be a crucial debate about a fearful West Against the Rest, to the more pressing issue of The West Against Itself.

This intra-West battle is being manifested in several ways: Viktor Orban in Hungary, eurosceptic coalitions in Austria and Italy, the advance of the ultra right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Sweden Democrats. In short it’s The Revenge of the European Deplorables.

Bannon’s ‘Paradise’ Regained

Into this European fray steps Steve Bannon, the master strategist who elected Donald Trump and is now taking the continent by storm. He is about to launch his own think tank, The Movement, in Brussels, to foment no less than a right-wing populist revolution.

It comes replete with Bannon spooking assorted EU lands by paraphrasing Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “I prefer to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Bannon’s growing influence in Europe has reached the Venice Biennale, where director Errol Morris presented a documentary on Bannon, American Dharma, based on 18 hours of interviews with Trump’s Svengali himself.

Bannon held court two weeks ago in Rome supported by Mischaël Modrikamen, the president of the Popular Party in Belgium, who is slated to lead The Movement. In Rome Bannon again met Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini – whom he had previously advised “for hours” to finally break a political coalition with fading star Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi. Salvini and Berlusconi though are now horse-trading again.

Bannon has correctly identified Italy as the vortex of post-politics, spearheading the crusade to defeat the EU. The game-changer should be the May 2019 European Parliament elections, which Bannon reads as a certified victory for Right populism and nationalist movements.

In this do-or-die battle between populism and the Davos Party, Bannon wants to play The Undertaker against a puny George Soros.

Bannon in Rome (CNBC)

Bannon is even seducing cynics in France by designating self-described “Jupiter” Emmanuel Macron, now in public opinion free fall, as public enemy number one. A faded U.S. newsweekly declared Macron to be The Last Man Standing between “European values” and, well, fascism. Bannon is more realistic: Macron is “a Rothschild banker who never made money – the definition of a loser…He imagines himself to be a new Napoleon.”

Bannon is connecting across Europe because he has identified how the West peddles “socialism for the very rich and the very poor” and “a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for everybody else.” Quite a few Europeans easily grasp his simplistic concept of Right populism, according to which citizens must be able to get jobs, something impossible when illegal immigration is used as a scam to depress workers’ salaries.

The political strategy underlining The Movement is to unite all European nationalist vectors – a currently fragmented mess featuring sovereignists, neoliberals, radicalized nationalists, racists, conservatives and extremists on a quest for respectability.

To his credit, Bannon viscerally understood how the EU is a vast, de facto “un-sovereignty” space held hostage to economic austerity. The EU bureaucracy can easily be construed as Illiberalism Central: It was never a democracy.

There’s no question Bannon impressed on Salvini the need to keep hammering over and over again how the Germany-France leadership of the EU is anti-democratic. But there’s a huge problem: The Movement, and the Right populism galaxy, center almost exclusively on the role of illegal migrants – leading non-ideological cynics to suspect this might be little else than State xenophobia posing as a revolt of the masses.

Meanwhile, in Plato’s Cave…

Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, teaching at the University of Westminster and a darling of the multicultural café society, could easily be depicted as the anti-Bannon. She does identify the “crisis of neoliberal hegemony” and is capable of outlining how post-politics is all about Right and Left wallowing together in a conceptual swamp.

The political impasse of the whole West once again revolves around TINA: There Is No Alternative, in this case to neoliberal globalization. The Goddess of the Market is Athena and Venus rolled into one. The question is how to organize a politically strong reaction against the all-out marketization of life.

Mouffe at least understands that just demonizing Right populism as irrational – while despising the “deplorables” – is not good enough.

Yet she places too much hope in the fuzzy political strategy of Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France, or Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Arguably the only progressive politician in Europe who has a clear shot at government is Jeremy Corbyn – who’s consuming all his energy fighting a nasty demonization campaign.

Mouffe: The anti-Bannon. (Stephan Röhl-Wikimedia Commons.)

Sanders has just launched a manifesto calling for a Progressive International – capable of outlining a New Deal 2.0 and a new Bretton Woods.

For his part, Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister and co-founder of theDiEM25 democratic movement, laments the triumph of a Nationalist International – at least stressing that they “sprang out of the cesspool of financialized capitalism”.

Yet he resorts to the same old players when it comes to pushing for a Progressive International: Sanders, Corbyn and his own DiEM25.

Mouffe’s conceptual solution is to bet on what she describes as Left populism, which can be construed as anything from “democratic socialism” to “participatory democracy”, depending “on the different national context.”

This implies that populism – relentlessly demonized by the neoliberal elites – is far from a toxic perversion of democracy, and can be authentically progressive.

Slavoj Zizek, in The Courage of Hopelessness, couldn’t agree more, when he stresses that when the masses “not convinced by ‘rational’ capitalist discourse” prefer a “populist anti-elitist stance,”this has nothing to do with “lower-class primitivism”.

In fact Noam Chomsky, way back in 1991, in Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, had brilliantly shown how Western “democracy” really works: “It is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated.”

“So what does Europe want?” Zizek asks. He holds the merit of identifying the “principal contradiction” of what he qualifies as “The New World Order” (actually we’re still under the slow burn of the Old Word Disorder). Zizek succinctly depicts the contradiction as “the structural impossibility of finding a global political order that could correspond to the global capitalist economy.”

And that’s why the “change” spectrum is so limited, and for the moment totally captured by Right populism. Nothing substantial can happen without a real socio-economic transformation, a new world-system replacing casino capitalism.

Taking the shadowplay in their Platonic – Russophobic – cave for reality, while mourning “the end of Atlanticism,” the champions of “Western values” prefer to adopt a diversionist tactic.

They keep on summoning fear of “illiberal” Putin and his “malign behavior” undermining the EU, coupled with “debt trap” neo-colonialism inflicted on unsuspecting customers by those devious Chinese.

These elites could not possibly understand they face a plight of their own making, courtesy of free market populism, which happens to be the apex of Western Illiberalism.

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