TBR News March 5, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., March 5. 2016: “The pious pontificating of the American (and foreign) media about Donald Trump has been enjoyable to observe. These intellectual giants and molders of public opinion were, almost to a man (or woman) dismissive of Trump and divided about whether Hillary or Bernie would make the best president. The more conservative ones contemplated Cruz with kindness and support. It should have been obvious to the gurus of the media that the final determinations rest with the public and all the bleatings, pontificating and snorting are as nothing when election day comes. The American public has grown very tired of the endless con jobs foisted off on them by the brainless media and a corrupt government and when someone like Trump exposes them, they listen. And they vote. Are the media pundits and box-cars full of experts going to flee to Canada if Trump is elected? Hopefully.”
How could everybody get it so wrong?
March 3, 2016
by Wesley Pruden
The Washington Times
The list of “experts,” “analysts,” self-appointed “strategists” and other know-it-alls who were wrong about Donald Trump is a long one, and nobody is as ignorant of why the Donald has had such an appeal and such staying power as the pundit who is paid to know everything, and never does.
Once upon a time a man or woman put in the early years on the Springfield Republican or the Log Cabin Democrat or the Bloomington Pantagraph, covering spats between aldermen or obscure state legislators, learning the trade along with something about the nature of humanity and acquiring a little familiarity with the body politic, and finally arriving in the city with knowledge, insight and a little learned humility. He was a hard man to fool.
But we’re all at the mercy now of progress, and columnists, commentators and pundits go straight from graduate school to a column, a microphone with a camera, certified like a CPA as a fully fledged doctor of humbuggery. This leaves them at the mercy of the flimflam artist, with no understanding of why and how an audience laps it up.
David Remnick, the editor of the precious and erudite New Yorker magazine, told his readers last summer that Mr. Trump was such an ignoramus, who knew nothing about politics, that his “whole con might end well before the first snows in Sioux City and Manchester.”
They’re still shoveling snow in New Hampshire — the last of it is expected to melt in time for the Fourth of July parade — and Mr. Remnick is still puzzled about why and how it happened.
He told Politico, the political daily, that he was shocked and sad. What he sees now, with the Donald well on his way to the Republican nomination, is “beyond belief” to a man of tender experience and training, and reflects an “ugliness” that appeals to “every worst instinct” of the nation beyond the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Mr. Remnick has a lot of distinguished company, even if most of it has not learned a lot from the experience. The smart set discounts experience, valuing only theory. Politico surveyed several of his colleagues, who have mostly taken to fainting couches in recovery rooms across the precincts of the mainstream media, so called.
James Fallows, who has spent three decades as national correspondent of Atlantic magazine, was even more confident than Mr. Remnick when he wrote early in the campaign cycle that “Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of the United States. Nor the 46th, nor any other number you might name. The chance of his winning the nomination and election is exactly zero.”
Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post was certain as early as last July that “Donald Trump is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016.” Nate Silver, who successfully applied higher math to presidential politics four years ago and made a name for himself as the guru who got it right, told his colleagues in November to “stop freaking out” about the Donald’s poll numbers. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Everyone “knew” that the Donald didn’t have “a ground game” (every political correspondent regrets that he is not a sportswriter in the toy department of the newspaper), and he would finally say something to attract the fire of the Gaffe Patrol and down he would go in flames. What few of the pundits could get their heads around was why Mr. Trump found such a receptive audience, how he could please so many conflicting parts of that audience. How on earth could he, a hard-cussin’ much-married man of vulgar worldly tastes, become such a hero of the evangelicals, usually so quick to disown one of their own for stepping out of line?
The lions of the legacy media have never understood the barely controlled rage of the Bible-believing unwashed at being scorned, disdained and despised, and along comes a man with a club and an eye for someone to hit with it. Grandma Grundy would forgive him a little cussin’. Some of the lions pretend to have learned a lesson, but it’s not that they were wrong, it was the people who were wrong and stubbornly unwilling to be educated. Some of the pundits are clinging to the hope that the Donald will be stopped and punditry will be redeemed.
Chris Wallace of Fox News is one of the truly contrite. “I think one of the things you learn is that you don’t know as much as you think you know, that for anyone foolish enough to think they’re an opinion maker or opinion shaper, this has been a lesson that the American people will make their own decision for themselves.” Now that hurts.
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversatins with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.
Conversation No. 8
Date: Sunday, April 14, 1996
Commenced: 3:24 PM CST
Concluded: 4:01 PM CST
GD: Hello?
RTC: Oh, hello, Gregory. I didn’t think you’d be calling today. Usually, you’re earlier.
GD: Went up to Madison. Always go up on the weekends. Borders book store has the best history section I’ve ever seen and there’s a good Chinese restaurant nearby. That’s my social life these days. Yourself?
RTC: Trying to keep busy. One of these days, I ought to get your creative opinion as to what to do about the Swiss. They’re right across the street from me and they keep using their microwave to send messages home and it’s been causing me trouble.
GD: Have you tried complaining to them?
RTC: Pointless. I tried lodging a complaint with DoS but no good there either. In the old days, a few words about this would have worked miracles but I’m out of harness and out of the picture. Gregory, a small piece of advice for you: Don’t get old.
GD: Can’t help it. I have an idea for you on the Swiss. You face them? What kind of building are they in?
RTC: It’s their embassy.
GD: Got a pencil?
RTC: Yes. Will a pen do?
GD: Yes, of course.
RTC: Well?
GD: Do you still have any connections with your tech section at Langley?
RTC: I think so. Why?
GD: There’s a wonderful little device called an audio oscillator. Do you want me to spell that?
RTC: I have it. Go on.
GD: It puts out sound waves. It’s easy to build if you know your business. Anyway, it’s in a smallish box…shoe box size…and you plug it in and point it at your target. It puts out sound that the human ear can’t hear but animals can. That’s not the point. I’m sure the Switzers don’t have poodles typing reports. Oh, and if your man is good enough, you can hit the frequency that causes involuntary bowel movements.
RTC: (Laughter) Now that’s something to consider.
GD: I thought you might enjoy that. Just imagine the entire Swiss embassy ankle deep in shit. Anyway, it makes the people on the other end nervous and irritable. They don’t know why but they feel depressed and very, very unhappy.
RTC: Go on. This is interesting.
GD: So the windows in the embassy will act as a sounding board and all the offices in the front of the building will be full of suicidal people or, if you’re lucky, filled with Swiss shit.
RTC: Can you build one of these for me?
GD: God no. I know nothing about electronics except how to plug them in. It’s not a state secret and very easy to build but I’m not your man on this one. I would……..you have windows facing them?
RTC: Oh, yes.
GD: Put it in a window, preferably opened, and plug it in. That’s all. Makes no noise at your end and your wife would never notice it. Just tell her it’s an air freshener or something.
RTC: No point in telling her anything. Can they detect anything over there?
GD: No unless they have budgies in every office. I mean this does work because I’ve tried it out. I once lived in an apartment and was friendly with the manager and his wife. They had a minority couple living there under section eight. Played their boom box all the time, never paid the rent on time and threatened the other neighbors. The police didn’t want to bother them so I suggested the solution. I had a friend at Radio Shack build an oscillator and since the apartments on both sides of the creeps were vacant because of the noise, I went into one, plugged the box in and put it right up against a connecting wall. And believe me, it did work. They moved out within a week. Jesus, what a mess they left behind. One or both of them used to shit in the shower stall, not to mention the fact that all the carpets had to be replaced and the walls patched and repainted. The manager was so happy he gave me six months of rent free on the condition I used my little toy to help him get rid of other obnoxious tenants. Anyway, I went into the apartment to see what it was like, being on the other end of the toy and believe me, it was something else, Robert. A feeling of anxiety coupled with severe depression…
RTC: No bowel movements?
GD: No but the smell in the place would have made me puke if I’d stayed there for another minute. Let me tell you, I wanted to get away from that place in the worst way and it was not the stench. No, the Swiss will not be happy campers once you turn the thing on. I would suggest that you turn it on about three times a day, at odd intervals and don’t leave it on all the time. They might get someone in to do a sweep and if they’re competent, they might be able to pick up the sonics.
RTC: Gregory, rather than my bothering the boys on this, could you get one for me? More than happy to pay for it.
GD: I’ll be happy to do it for free, Robert. It’ll take about three weeks. I’ll start tomorrow. I know at least one person who can build one of these for sure. I suppose if the Swiss found out about this, they might make trouble for you so I will work on this here. And keep you posted.
RTC: If this works, Gregory, I will be greatly in your debt.
GD: Can we talk about Kennedy?
RTC: Oh, I think we certainly can.
GD: That I appreciate. After I build your box for you, then we can discuss this?
RTC: As I said.
GD: Is there any paper on that subject? If I publish anything, the government stool pigeons will yammer that it’s all made up and they, personally, can’t believe a word of it. And consider the huge number of books on the subject. The thousands of writers will join in a chorus of denial. After all, I didn’t mention the man in the sewer, the man on the grassy knoll…
RTC: Ah, but there was a man on the grassy knoll. Not in the sewer, of course, but I read that there were men in the trees, on the roofs of various buildings and lots of very funny stories. Of course we were responsible for most of them. Keeps the idiot public satisfied and very confused. I have a Soviet report on this that basically says it all. The box first.
GD: I’ll make it big enough to pulverize the building.
RTC: No, Gregory, just enough to drive them crazy. Just like they’ve been driving me up the wall.
GD: I don’t suppose you could hint a little on this?
RTC: Well, it wasn’t the Mafia or the KGB and I can say very clearly that it wasn’t Lee Oswald or the Girl Scouts. Now that’s all for now on that subject.
GD: It’s your call.
RTC: To change the subject, you mentioned Mountbatten some time ago. What can you tell me about that?
GD: The name Moran mean anything to you?
RTC: Oh, I think it could. Tell me what you know and I will comment on it.
GD: Moran is not his name but no one ever uses their real name these days. He was, probably still is, Irish-American. His grandfather was hanged by the Brits after the ’16 rising in Dublin and he hates them with a real passion. He was one of your boys who liased with the IRA Provo people. Worked out of our embassy in Dublin as one of those utterly transparent cultural aides. Everyone knows the legal officers are FBI and the USIA people are all CIA so why bother with the name game? Anyway, this Moran got the idea to kill off Lord Mountbatten1. Besides the dead grandfather, he had an uncle who lived in Canada and was killed at Dieppe. That was Mountbatten’s grab at fame, you know. They had planned a cross-channel raid on Dieppe but cancelled it. Mountbatten was pathologically ambitious and as empty of brains as a ladle decided to go ahead with the raid anyway. Churchill was out of the country, in Egypt if memory serves, and off they went. Germans knew it was in the wind and the invasion party ran into a German small boat convoy enroute and the game was known. The town was heavily armed and the poor Canadians were slaughtered. Moran hated Mountbatten, who got away with it because he was connected to the royal family. Actually, there’s an interesting story about his family. They were of the house of Hessen-Darmstadt. Same small princely house that produced the present Prince Philip and the last Empress of Russia. One of them, a Prince Alexander, married a Polish Jewess whose father was the chief baker to the King of Poland and because the family did not want the title involved with Jews, they changed their name to Battenberg. And later, that was anglicized to Mountbatten. So far so good?
RTC: You left me way behind, Gregory, but go on.
GD: You can check it out later.
RTC: I will. Prince Philip is a German? I thought he was Greek.
GD: So does everyone else. The Prince Consort was in the Hitler Youth and his brother was in the SS. I have a picture of Phil in a Nazi uniform. But to continue here. Mountbatten had married into the Cassel family. The old man was banker to Edward VII. More Jewish connections again. Anyway, the old man, God, he was almost 80 then, used to summer up in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. He had a sail boat docked at Mullaghnmore and one day, Mountbatten took some his family out fishing. I can’t remember the name…oh yes, the Shadow. That was the boat’s name. It was painted green. Anyway, it sailed out into the bay and suddenly blew up. Mountbatten lost his legs and died of blood loss and shock and a few more got killed. The man who did this, who ran the operation, is a friend of mine.
RTC: Moran?
GD: No, an Irish friend who was with the Provos. He was up on the cliff and pushed the button that set off the charge his people planted the night before. Then they all went their separate ways and one of them got caught by a traffic stop. My friend got clean away. A very decent fellow and a good friend. I could be more specific but we don’t need to go into that. So Moran got his revenge and there was a state funeral. I do like the Irish, Robert, but if there were only two of them left alive in the world, they would be sending letter bombs to each other.
RTC: There’s some truth to that, Gregory, but not a lot. We got connected with the IRA people because we wanted to protect a certain oil refinery in Belfast that they had been threatening to blow up. The CIA has many, many friends in business and one of them asked us to be sure they left the project alone. So we supplied them explosives, intelligence and some support in exchange for their neutrality concerning American property in Ireland. It worked out.
GD: But not for Mountbatten, though.
RTC: He was a pompous ass.
GD: But a member of the royal family, Robert! Mostly inbred idiots, as a friend of mine once said, who marry their own cousins and produce children with the intellect of chickens.
RTC: How cruel. But true. And keep me posted on the box, won’t you?
GD: And look for the Kennedy papers. Goodbye for now, Robert and my best to your wife.
(Concluded at 4:01 PM CST)
The FBI’s shady iPhone evasions: Why its claims about the San Bernardino attack make no sense at all
The agency’s director claims it needs Apple to hack an iPhone. So why can’t he answer simple questions?
March 3, 2016
by Marcy Wheeler
Salon
“There was a mistake made in that 24 hours after the attack.”
That’s the thoroughly unsatisfactory answer FBI Director Jim Comey gave on Tuesday when New York Congressman Jerry Nadler asked him why, a day after Apple had started providing FBI 24/7 help on its investigation into the December 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, the FBI nevertheless instructed killer Syed Rezwan Farook’s employer, San Bernardino County, to change the password to his iCloud account.
As Nadler described when introducing his question, had the FBI not changed that password, it would not have needed Apple to help it hack Farook’s phone, because it would have been able to obtain a full backup of the device. As Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell explained at the end of the hearing almost five hours later, had the phone just been brought to a familiar wifi and permitted to auto-update, “The very information that the FBI is seeking would have been available and we could have pulled it down from the Cloud.” There would be no need to force Apple to spend weeks writing a custom version of its operating system, because the FBI could have had that information on December 6.
But note: Comey’s response — his answer to Nadler’s question of why the FBI had instructed San Bernardino County to change that password, the admission that “there was a mistake made,” which figured centrally in most of the coverage of the hearing — was non-responsive. It didn’t answer why the FBI had done that. And Comey’s explanation, offered to Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz an hour later, that “there was an issue created in an effort to get in it quickly,” made no sense at all, as would have been crystal clear had he given it when Nadler first asked the question near the beginning of the hearing.
First, Comey made an error in his response to Nadler. This happened not “in that 24 hours after the attack,” but instead onDecember 6 — four days after the attack, three days after the FBI seized the phone, and a full day after the FBI contacted Apple at 2:46 in the morning on December 5 and started getting 24/7 support from the iPhone maker. Not only had they already done nothing with Farook’s work phone for 3 days, but according to a declaration from Apple’s manager of global privacy and law Lisa Olle, they also had already obtained two batches of information from Apple pertaining to three different names and nine different accounts.
The FBI was already in contact with Apple, the company was providing same day service to legal requests, and yet the FBI director’s explanation for why the FBI screwed up and set off a legal fight, one likely to end at the Supreme Court, is that they wanted the information they had already sat on for three days quickly. As Nadler went on to point out, the FBI then waited another 47 days before they asked for the iCloud back-up from Apple on January 22.
It makes no sense.
Comey’s non-response took place just minutes after Michigan Congressman John Conyers’ reminder that the intelligence community had been waiting for a terrorist attack so it could demand back doors into encrypted devices. As the congressman laid out, last August, Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Bob Litt had suggested in an email obtained by the Washington Post that the government might be more successful demanding back doors after a terrorist attack.“I’m deeply concerned by this cynical mindset,” Conyers said of the revelation. “I would be deeply disappointed if it turns out that the government is found to be exploiting a national tragedy to pursue a change in the law.”
At one point, Comey even seemed to forget he was talking about a terrorist attack.
Through most of the hearing he — and all members of the committee — maintained a focus on the attack, which killed 14 and wounded 22. But in response to a question from Iowa Congressman Steven King about ISIL getting nuclear weapons, Comey emphasized the need to solve the encryption question now, rather than in the wake of an attack. “I do worry that it’s hard to have nuanced complicated conversations like this in an emergency and in the wake of a disaster,” Comey said in a hearing in which he had repeatedly invoked the seriousness of the San Bernardino attack. “Which is why I think it’s so important we have this conversation now. Because in the wake of something awful happening it will be hard to talk about this in a thoughtful, nuanced way.”
Here we are, having a discussion about back-dooring Apple phones because of an attack that killed 14, with the FBI director talking about how difficult it would be to have a nuanced discussion in the wake of something awful.
There’s one more reason to think FBI might be exploiting this tragic attack just to establish a precedent. There’s little reason to believe anything of value will be found on the phone — which, after all, was Farook’s work phone, and which he didn’t destroy, like he did two other phones. Apple’s lawyers point out the FBI would not want to have this fight in public if they thought the phone would lead to unknown accomplices. Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski laid out ten reasons why the phone was unlikely to have been used to plan the attack. Former Homeland Security Czar Richard Clarke judged, “The possibility that there’s any information on this phone about an imminent attack is negligible or zero.” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan told NPR, “there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone.” Salihin Kondoker, whose wife was shot three times in the attack, said in a letter to the court written in support of Apple’s stance, “it is unlikely there is any valuable information on this phone.”
None of those predictions made it into the hearing.
This would not be the first time the intelligence community, or even Jim Comey, used a terrorist attack to extend surveillance. In 2004, then-Deputy Attorney General Comey along with other DOJ lawyers and the CIA, used the threat of an election-year attack, a threat based off a fabrication, to convince the secret FISA Court to approve a dragnet of Americans’ email.
In that case, there’s good reason to believe Comey didn’t know the terror threat was bogus. In this case, however, Comey proved unable to offer a credible answer a very simple question: Why FBI did something at the very beginning of this process that made demanding Apple create a back door necessary. Before this process goes any further, American citizens are due a better answer to that question.
Keys to the drone: New audio-video technology sniffs out unseen flying foes
March 4, 2016
RT
A hybrid audio-video surveillance sensor named DualCam is set to revolutionise how security systems detect threats they cannot see – through the use of sound.
Imploying “advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and signal processing techniques”, the DualCam boasts sophisticated sound recognition and ‘localization’ technology to spot foreign objects such as drones and small boats which are not visible to the human eye.
It can tell you what the target is and exactly how far away it is, night or day, regardless of the climatic conditions. It can even detect gunfire.
The device, which was created by the Department of Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision (PAVIS) at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), notifies human operators should the security of the property in question by compromised.
This latest development is sure to be of interest to everyone from prison wardens to nuclear power station bosses to the heads of military bases, given the growing use of drones for smuggling, spying and bombing.
Indeed, if you’re lucky enough to own a luxury yacht, for example, this gadget could be handy for keeping your valuables safe!
DualCam is, however, patent pending so it might be a little while longer before it hits the market. Until then, night vision goggles will have to do.
Secrecy News
From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2016, Issue No. 20
March 4, 2016
ODNI WILL REVISE DECLASSIFICATION FEE POLICY
In response to criticism of the hefty fees that could be charged to public requesters in its new Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) rule, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has agreed to modify the rule.
The revised rule will adopt the more flexible and forgiving approach used in ODNI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program.
“We will pull back the MDR rule and swap out the fee structure there for the fee structure in the FOIA policy,” said Jennifer Hudson, director of the ODNI Information Management Division.
This represents a substantial change. In comments on the rule submitted yesterday by the Federation of American Scientists, we recommended such a change. We noted that the MDR fee schedule was inconsistent in several respects with existing law and policy and, in particular, that it differed from the cost recovery procedures in ODNI’s FOIA program:
* The MDR rule would charge 50 cents per page for photocopying, but ODNI charges only 10 cents per page for responses to FOIA requests.
* The MDR rule would have made requesters responsible “for paying all fees,” but ODNI always waives costs of $10 or lower under FOIA.
* The MDR rule did not provide for discretionary fee waivers for public interest or other reasons, but the FOIA policy does.
Now all of these discrepancies will be eliminated. Perhaps most significantly, “We will also make sure that there is room [in the MDR process] for discretion in charging fees,” Ms. Hudson said in an email message. “I’m sure you know from looking at our FOIA reports that we have exercised our discretion to not charge fees quite a bit in the past.”
She noted, however, that “The search/review charges are identical” under the proposed MDR rule and under FOIA. “FOIA just breaks [the charges] down into 15 minute increments where the MDR rule is by the hour. The end result is the same.”
“At the end of the day, I don’t think it will make as much of a difference as people think,” she said.
BILL WOULD AUTHORIZE RELEASE OF CRS REPORTS
A bill to make Congressional Research Service reports available to the public through authorized rather than unauthorized channels was introduced in Congress yesterday.
The bill was sponsored in the Senate (S. 2639) by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and in the House (H.R. 4702) by Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL).
While the support of these congressional sponsors of both parties is promising, the proposal to provide authorized public access to non-confidential CRS publications is not assured of passage.
A press release from Sen. Leahy’s office yesterday noted gamely that “McCain and Leahy have partnered for more than a decade in pressing for this change.”
Still, conditions for approval of the measure seem more favorable today than for many years past, thanks largely to a broad coalition of support mobilized by Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress and Kevin Kosar of the R Street Institute, themselves former CRS employees.
In the meantime, the latest reports from CRS that are not yet subject to authorized public disclosure include the following.
Lead in Flint, Michigan’s Drinking Water: Federal Regulatory Role, CRS Insight, updated March 2, 2016
Authorizing New Additions to Memorials in the District of Columbia: Issues for Consideration, CRS Insight, March 2, 2016
Cybersecurity: Education, Training, and R&D Authoritative Reports and Resources, March 3, 2016
Cybersecurity: Overview Reports and Links to Government, News, and Related Resources, March 2, 2016
Unfunded Mandates Reform Act: History, Impact, and Issues, March 2, 2016
Child Support: An Overview of Census Bureau Data on Recipients, March 1, 2016
The Proposed U.S. Foreign Assistance Initiative “Peace Colombia”, CRS Insight, March 3, 2016
Latin America and the Caribbean: Fact Sheet on Leaders and Elections, March 1, 2016
Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) and Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC): Background and Issues for Congress, February 26, 2016
International Trade and Finance: Key Policy Issues for the 114th Congress, 2nd Session, February 29, 2016
Strange but True: The Oddballs on Parade
from The Encyclopedia of American Loons
Shawn Sieracki
Lee Siegel is a critical-thinking-challenged moron; we have noticed, but we don’t particularly feel like giving him much more attention than necessary. Instead, we will have a look at a more obviously serious issue associated with altmed practices, namely germ theory denialism. Yes, there are people out there who do not believe that germs cause disease. Indeed, quite a number of moderately popular altmed therapies rely on this idea – after all, it is hard to argue that bells and pyramids and crystals can chase bacteria; much easier to argue that they “restore” your mystical energies and balance the humors (and as these claims are formulated they are generally not even really testable); therefore, diseases cannot be caused by bacteria but must be caused by something else. Germ theory denialism is the conclusion of the very first chapter of John L. Fielder’s Handbook of Nature Cure Volume One: Nature Cure vs. Medical Science, and if you are pining for some intellectual suffering, you can have a look at the Homeopathy World Community’s “Louis Pasteur’s germ Theory – Wrong”, or stuff written by borderline coherent crazies such as Nancy Appleton and Judie C. Snelson (“Why the Anthrax Bacteria is No More Dangerous to You Than Any Other Germ”). We have already discussed the efforts of Tim O’Shea.
At least according to youtube’s search engines, a major source of germ theory denialist delusions is Shawn Sieracki. Sieracki is affiliated with the Whole Body Healing Center of Lewisville, whose website includes such items as the “detox challenge” (“Detoxify or die!”) and which offers services such as the legendary “detox foot bath”. For instance, in his video “Naturopathic Minute: Germ Theory” he lays it out pretty clearly: “germ theory is not correct”. The claim is discussed here, and it becomes pretty clear pretty early on that Sieracki actually has serious problems even understanding what the claim that germs cause disease even means. Instead, Sieracki tries to argue that whereas “germs are present in disease not as causes, but as superficial helpers brought there by Nature to rid the body of disease.” One wonders if he is willing to test the idea out on himself.
Then again, Sieracki is a homeopath, and his center “specialize[s] in homeopathic remedies, herbal and nutritional supplements, and wellness programs.” Heck, he and his partner Gary Tunsky even have a Quantum QXCI/SCIO machine, one of William Nelson’s inventions, about which Sieracki’s says: “The body scan is a device that scans the body energetically [how cool]. By that I mean it is reading the body’s meridian system that was developed many years ago by Chinese acupuncturist. Acupuncture is the most accurate medical science in the world. It has been around for over 5000 years. The quantum is taking today’s technology and combining it with the science of acupuncture.” But I don’t think that’s how quantum mechanics really works. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how he attempts to hook unsuspecting readers: “As the SCIO has been devised using the principles of Quantum Physics, that question is easier asked than answered. Basically, during treatment, the SCIO measures the body’s resonance/reactance pattern and determines what benefit has occurred in the time period since the last measurement (less than a second earlier). If there has not been an improvement, the input resonance is altered. It maintains each beneficial setting as long as it is helping and changes it as soon as it is no longer useful.” That, readers, is amazing gibberish, and it is hard to imagine that Sieracki isn’t aware of that.
The machine looks suspiciously like something scientologists use, but according to Sieracki it can diagnose a range of illnesses and ailments in a matter of minutes. In other words, Sieracki takes his praise for the machine’s effectiveness where even scientologists don’t dare.
M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night doesn’t need much introduction. In fact, it is probably pretty obvious how he qualified himself for an entry in our Encyclopedia as well. He might have successfully hid his delusions of grandeur, SPAGs and general ignorance for some time, but at least with the release of the movie “The Happening” in 2008 even his most ardent fans were sort of forced to admit not only that the movie is shit but that it is shit because Shyamalan is a loon.
The movie in question centers around a high-school biology teacher caught in an epidemy of mass suicides. The movie explains these mysterious suicides as being driven by the “spontaneous evolution” of a “toxin” in plants, and the protagonist, in a poignant turning point of the movie, gets to dismiss those so-called scientists’ ability to explain anything, since it (evolution) is all “just a theory”: “Science will come up with a reason to put in the books but in the end it’s just a theory. We fail to acknowledge forces at work beyond our understanding.” Therefore God, or at least some fluffy New Age variant of God (big-N Nature, perhaps). The grand finale of the movie consists of a monologue about the limits of rational thought delivered by a supposed scientist (and you can see Shyamalan himself try to invoke the placebo effect as proof that nature is beyond rational thought here. It’s pretty feeble.)Of course, a film maker does whatever he wants, but given the circumstances it is hard to avoid interpreting the movie as reflecting some apparent insight Shyamalan is bent on sharing with his viewers, and that insight is absolutely moronic. The movie itself is pretty much an anti-science screed based on Shyamalan’s failure to grasp science, reason and rational thought, as well his endorsement of Intelligent Design Creationism. There is a comparison between the movie and “Expelled” here, and a discussion of what the movie reveals about Shyamalan’s attitude toward and understanding of science here.
In an interview Shyamalan also claimed to have been motivated by Einstein’s alleged religious conversion fueled by the unknowable universe, which is a myth. The movie is also thoroughly sexist. His previous flick, “Signs”, is arguably little better.
Why is 2016 smashing heat records?
January and February have both broken temperature records. Karl Mathiesen examines how much is down to El Niño versus manmade climate change
March 4, 2016
by Karl Mathiesen
The Guardian
Yet another global heat record has been beaten. It appears January 2016 – the most abnormally hot month in history, according to Nasa – will be comprehensively trounced once official figures come in for February.
Initial satellite measurements, compiled by Eric Holthaus at Slate, put February’s anomaly from the pre-industrial average between 1.15C and 1.4C. The UN Paris climate agreement struck in December seeks to limit warming to 1.5C if possible.
“Even the lower part of that range is extraordinary,” said Will Steffen, an emeritus professor of climate science at Australian National University and a councillor at Australia’s Climate Council.
It appears that on Wednesday, the northern hemisphere even slipped above the milestone 2C average for the first time in recorded history. This is the arbitrary limit above which scientists believe global temperature rise will be “dangerous”.
The Arctic in particular experienced terrific warmth throughout the winter. Temperatures at the north pole approached 0C in late December – 30C to 35C above average.
Mark Serreze, the director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, described the conditions as “absurd”.
“The heat has been unrelenting over the entire season,” he said. “I’ve been studying Arctic climate for 35 years and have never seen anything like this before”.
All this weirdness follows the record-smashing year of 2015, which was 0.9C above the 20th century average. This beat the previous record warmth of 2014 by 0.16C.
These tumbling temperature records are often accompanied in media reports by the caveat that we are experiencing a particularly strong El Niño – perhaps the largest in history. But should El Niño and climate change be given equal billing?
No, according to Professor Michael Mann, the director of Penn State Earth System Science Centre. He said it was possible to look back over the temperature records and assess the impact of an El Niño on global temperatures.
“A number of folks have done this,” he said, “and come to the conclusion it was responsible for less than 0.1C of the anomalous warmth. In other words, we would have set an all-time global temperature record [in 2015] even without any help from El Niño.”
Global surface temperature is the major yardstick used to track how we are changing the climate. It is the average the UN Paris agreement refers to.
But the atmosphere doesn’t stop at the surface. In fact 93% of the extra energy trapped by the greenhouse gases humans have emitted gets sunk into the oceans – just 1% ends up in the atmosphere where temperature is most often and most thoroughly measured. During El Niño, which occurs every three to six years, currents in the Pacific Ocean bring warm water to the surface and heat up the air.
Jeff Knight from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, said their modelling set the additional heat from a big El Niño, like the current one, at about 0.2C. He said wind patterns in the northern hemisphere had added another 0.1C to recent monthly readings.
“The bottom line is that the contributions of the current El Niño and wind patterns to the very warm conditions globally over the last couple of months are relatively small compared to the anthropogenically driven increase in global temperature since pre-industrial times,” he added.
Steffen said the definitive assessment of this El Niño and its effect on the world’s temperature would only be possible once the event had run its course (it has now peaked and is expected to end in the second quarter of this year). But he agreed that past El Niño cycles could be an appropriate guide for the order of magnitude of the effect.
The picture becomes less clear cut when we talk about monthly records. Even weather trends can have small effects on the monthly average temperature, said Knight. The effect of El Niño traditionally increases as it dies, so Mann believes it may have added more than the “nominal” o.1C during the past three months.
In the Arctic, the effect of El Niño is poorly understood but likely to be weak, said Knight. “Given that the Arctic has been very warm for a number of years, with record low sea ice, it is more likely that the warmth there currently is part of a long-term trend rather than the response to a episodic event like El Niño.”
Steffen says quantifying the relative contributions of El Niño and climate change on a monthly or even annual basis cannot help to answer how fast the world is warming. Only trends over 30 years really matter.
But the pile up of records we have had in the early part of this century are significant. All things being constant, record hot years should occur once every 150 years. Yet 1998, 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2015 have all been record breakers.
A study published in January found that even without last year’s mammoth anomaly such a run was 600 to 130,000 times more likely to have occurred with human interference than without.
“The fact that you are getting records so close, one after the other is really striking. And that is symptomatic of that long-term trend,” said Steffen.
But while they may be poor signals for long-term climate change, record hot months and years do have an immediate and tangible impact.
“It’s making heat waves worse. Here in Australia it bumps up the bushfire danger weather really fast. It tends to lead to drier conditions in our part of the world. These things are exacerbated by El Niños, so I don’t want to downplay the importance of them for human suffering,” said Steffen.
Killing Someone Else’s Beloved
Promoting the American Way of War in Campaign 2016
by Mattea Kramer
Tom Dispaatch
The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children.
It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound, it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely competing over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands — and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts — could easily be taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner, his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown.
Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest — and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid — when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East. Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.
Classified documents recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the “killing campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed a “baseball card” — a condensed dossier with a portrait of the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S. interests — that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing in the Oval Office. The president then meets with more than 100 representatives of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just which of those cards will be selected picked for death. (The New York Times has vividly described this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.)
Orders then make their way down to drone operators somewhere in the United States, thousands of miles from the individuals slated to be killed, who remotely pilot the aircraft to the location and then pull the trigger. But when those drone operators launch missiles on the other side of the world, the terrifying truth is that the U.S. “is often unsure who will die,” as a New York Times headline put it.
That’s because intel on a target’s precise whereabouts at any given moment can be faulty. And so, as the Times reported, “most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” In 2014, for instance, the human-rights group Reprieve, analyzing what limited data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill 41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed. The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single target. The Guardian reported that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan — only six of whom were eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes — the U.S. killed an estimated 142 children.
Trump’s plan merely to murder the relatives of terrorists seems practically tame, by comparison.
Their Grief and Mine
Apparently you and I are meant to consider all those accidental killings as mere “collateral damage,” or else we’re not meant to consider them at all. We’re supposed to toggle to the “off” position any sentiment of remorse or compassion that we might feel for all the civilians who die thanks to our country’s homicidal approach to keeping us safe.
I admit to a failing here: when I notice such stories, sometimes buried deep in news reports — including the 30 people killed, three of them children, when U.S. airpower “accidentally” hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October; or the two women and three children blasted to smithereens by U.S. airpower last spring at an Islamic State checkpoint in northern Iraq because the pilots of two A-10 Warthogs attacking the site didn’t realize that civilians were in the vehicles stopped there; or the innumerable similar incidents that have happened with remarkable regularity and which barely make it into American news reports — I find I can’t quite achieve the cold distance necessary to accept our government’s tactics. And for this I blame (or thank) my father.
To understand why it’s so difficult for me to gloss over the dead, you have to know that on December 1, 2003, a date I will never forget nor fully recover from, I called home from a phone booth on a cobblestone street in Switzerland — where I was backpacking at the time — and learned that my Dad was dead. A heart attack that struck as suddenly as a Hellfire missile.
Standing in that sun-warmed phone booth clutching the receiver with a slick hand, vomit gurgling up at the back of my throat, I pressed my eyes closed and saw my Dad. First, I saw his back as he sat at the broad desk in his home office, his spot of thinning hair revealed. Then, I saw him in his nylon pants and baseball cap, paused at the kitchen door on his way to play paddle tennis. And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston’s Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered cheek.
A few days later, after mute weeping won me a seat on a fully booked trans-Atlantic flight, I stood in the wan light of early December and watched the employees of the funeral home as they unloosed the pulleys to lower Dad’s wooden box into the ground. I peered down into that earthen hole, crying and sweating and shivering in the stinging cold, and tried to make sense of the senseless: Why was he dead while the rest of us lived?
And that’s why, when I read about all the innocent civilians we’ve been killing over the years with the airpower that presidential candidate Ted Cruz calls “a blessing,” I tend to think about the people left behind. Those who loved the people we’ve killed. I wonder how they received the news. (“We’ve had a tragedy here,” my Mom told me.) I wonder about the shattering anguish they surely feel at the loss of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends. I wonder what memories come to them when they squeeze their eyes closed in grief. And I wonder if they’ll ever be able to pick up the pieces of their lives and return to some semblance of normalcy in societies that are often shattering around them. (What I don’t wonder about, though, is whether or not they’re more likely to become radicalized — to hate not just our drones but our country and us — because the answer to that is obvious.)
Playing God in the Oval Office
“It’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone,” actor Liam Neeson recently wrote on Facebook. He wasn’t talking about drone strikes, but about the fundamental experience of loss — of losing a loved one by any means. He was marking five years since his wife’s sudden death. “They say the hardest thing in the world is losing someone you love,” he added. I won’t disagree. After losing her husband, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posted about “the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me, endless and empty.” After her husband’s sudden death, author Joan Didion described grief as a “relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
That squares with the description offered by a man in Yemen who had much of his extended family blown away by an American drone at his wedding. “I felt myself going deeper and deeper into darkness,” the man later told a reporter. The drone arrived just after the wedding party had climbed into vehicles strewn with ribbons to escort the bride to her groom’s hometown. Everyone’s belly was full of lamb and it was dusk. It was quiet. Then the sky opened, and four missiles rained down on the procession, killing 12.
U.S. airpower has hit a bunch of other weddings, too. And funerals. And clinics. And an unknown and unknowable number of family homes. The CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal regions of Pakistan even led a group of American and Pakistani artists to install an enormous portrait of a child on the ground in a frequently targeted region of that country. The artists wanted drone operators to see the face of one of the young people they might be targeting, instead of the tiny infrared figures on their computer consoles that they colloquially refer to as “bugsplats.” It’s an exhortation to them not to kill someone else’s beloved.
Once in a while a drone operator comes forward to reveal the emotional and psychic burden of passing 12-hour shifts in a windowless bunker on an Air Force base, killing by keystroke for a living. One serviceman’s six years on the job began when he was 21 years old and included a moment when he glimpsed a tiny figure dart around the side of a house in Afghanistan that was the target of a missile already on its way. In terror, he demanded of his co-pilot, “Did that look like a child to you?” Feverishly, he began tapping messages to ask the mission’s remote observer — an intelligence staffer at another location — if there was a child present. He’ll never know the answer. Moments later, the missile struck the house, leveling it. That particular drone operator has since left the military. After his resignation, he spent a bitterly cold winter in his home state of Montana getting blackout drunk and sleeping in a public playground in his government-issued sleeping bag.
Someone else has, of course, taken his seat at that console and continues to receive kill orders from above.
Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as civilians. (Ted Cruz’s comment about carpet-bombing ISIS until we find out “if sand can glow in the dark” has practically become a catchphrase.) But it’s not just the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington’s increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further institutionalized and ramped up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect.
When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god.
Who will get your support as the best candidate to continue killing the loved ones of others?
Go to the polls, America.
At #CPAC2016, Fear of a Muslim Planet Dominates a Mainstream Republican Conference
March 4, 2016
by Zaid Jilani
The Intercept
“You’ve got to start shutting down the mosques that are … practicing sedition,” warned British politician Paul Weston during a session at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “You’ve got to stop them speaking in Urdu. You’ve got to put spies in there to see what they’re saying.”
CPAC is a mainstream, Republican-allied political conference, and this year’s featured guests included House Speaker Paul Ryan and GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
But the conference also included a number of speakers who fed attendees tales of Muslims conquering Europe, infiltrating our schools, and ending Western civilization as we know it.
It began with a plenary session featuring Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, along with leading Islamophobes Jim Hanson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
King warned of “radical Islamists in this country” entering the country illegally. He rattled off a list of Muslim-majority countries, claiming that we have “59,000 people from countries other than Mexico … illegally coming to this country. … They’re coming here to do harm.”
Hanson is the executive vice president of Frank Gaffney’s notoriously Islamophobic Center for Security Policy. He pointed to American Muslim organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Muslim Student Association chapters at universities, saying, “These guys have a plan. In their own words, they call it ‘civilization jihad.’”
Hanson said it’s “much tougher to see because they use our own freedoms and liberties against us to try and destroy our own culture from within. That’s where you see things like ‘be Muslim for a day at school,’ where they have school kids reciting a Muslim prayer that’s used for conversion to Islam. They slipped that one past a school board. Those are people who are sharing the same goals as ISIS, as al Qaeda, as Boko Haram.”
Ali, a fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard, has worked hard to reframe herself as a moderate reformer of Islam after previously comparing the religion to Nazism and calling for war on the faith itself. But she didn’t distance herself from Hanson’s likening of Muslim American schoolchildren and vicious terrorists. “I feel like literally everything has been said,” she started, complimenting her fellow panelists.
After Muhammad founded his religion in Mecca, he went to Medina and “developed a philosophy,” she said. “And that doctrine of Muhammad in Medina is the antithesis of the idea of America.”
Gaffney’s group also organized additional smaller panels afterward. At one titled “Countering the Global Jihad,” Hanson and Gaffney were joined by Weston and another far-right European thinker, Lars Hedegaard.
Weston and Hedegaard’s role was to convince attendees that Europe was being dominated by Muslim invaders and that if America did not act, it would be next.
“The English have taken on the teachings of the feminist groups and we no longer have enough children,” claimed Weston, whose claim to fame is being arrested at an anti-Muslim demonstration for blocking the steps of a public building and engaging in incitement, which the right-wing tabloid press later claimed was an arrest solely for quoting Winston Churchill. “The Islamic immigrants coming in are averaging four children per family.” He went on to claim that some families are producing 16 children because Muslim men may take up to four wives.
He claimed that Sweden was “literally a lost country,” and now the “rape capital of the world,” thanks to its policies allowing in Muslim migrants. (In 2009, about 5 percent of Swedes were identified as Muslims.)
Hedegaard, an anti-Muslim writer from Denmark, was shot at in an attempted assassination in 2013. The identity of the attacker remains unknown, but the country’s Muslim organizations immediately rallied to Hedegaard’s defense, arguing that his right to speech should not be impugned.
This show of solidarity apparently had little impact on his thinking. “Europe as we knew it is just a few years away from a complete breakdown,” he told the CPAC audience. The culprits are “millions of so-called refugees.” And he predicted “This will end in breakdown, this will end in warfare, this will end in bloodshed.”
Fear was the order of the day. One member of the audience, identifying himself as a resident of North Carolina, spoke of his fears of traveling with his family to Europe: “They always had a dream of going visiting the queen and London and all that kind of stuff. Not no more! It’s just not worth it for them to go through that and worry about that.”
Another audience member imagined warfare between Muslim migrants and the West: “I don’t think they’re going to totally roll over. And I don’t see, given our Second Amendment, I don’t see us rolling over.”
Shortly before the event, I asked Gaffney about his theory that Dearborn, Michigan, is a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims. Revealingly, Gaffney admitted that he has never even been to Dearborn. When I asked how a city with many bars is somehow off-limits for non-Muslims, Gaffney claimed I was interrupting him and cut off the interview.
CPAC 2016 is not a Donald Trump rally, or a David Duke convention. In fact, Trump is the only GOP presidential contender who didn’t attend. The sponsor list includes mainstream right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Examiner, the National Review, Log Cabin Republicans, Young America’s Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute.
Yet it featured speakers who were touting civilizational war against the planet’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Where are the moderate Republicans?
Cheap oil is taking shipping routes back to the 1800s
The plummeting price of oil on international markets has had many effects – one of which is that it may be cheaper for ships to travel right around Africa than go through the Suez Canal
March 4, 2016
by Chris Baraniuk
BBC
The Suez Canal was one of the most significant engineering projects of the 19th Century. It was a gargantuan task that took nearly 20 years to build and an estimated 1.5 million workers took part – with many thousands dying in the process. But when it finally opened in 1869, ships could travel from the Red Sea – between Africa and Asia – to the Mediterranean, cutting weeks off a journey. It was a revolution for trade.
Ever since, passage through the canal has been considered more or less vital to global business. Shipping firms pay what amounts to several billion dollars every year to the Suez Canal Authority, an Egyptian state-owned entity, for the privilege of travelling via the canal.
To take an example, it cuts a modern journey from Singapore to Rotterdam in the Netherlands by nearly 3,500 nautical miles – saving vessel owners lots of time and lots of money.
However, more and more some ships are deciding not to take the Suez route. Instead, they are travelling around the Cape of Good Hope, right at the southern tip of Africa. Over 100 ships did this between late October 2015 and the end of the year.
“I’ve been covering shipping for the last eight years,” says Michelle Wiese Bockmann, from oil industry analysis firm OPIS Tanker Tracker. “It is very rare to see this volume going round the Cape.” Right now, she’s keeping tabs on half a dozen diesel and jet fuel-carrying ships on this very route.
One of the big factors here, explains Bockmann, is the low price of oil. This means that “bunker fuel” – the thick, heavy fuel the ships themselves run on – is currently very cheap. Indeed, Singapore prices for such fuel have fallen from around $400 (£286) per metric ton in May 2015 to around $150 (£107) today.
As a result, sea journeys aren’t as costly as they have been in recent years. But is there any sense in taking longer than you need to? Ship manufacturer Maersk estimates that a vessel travelling at 13.5 knots will take an extra 11 days to go via the Cape. Why bother?
For one thing, there are steep fees for using the Suez Canal – Maersk says these can be approximately $350,000 (£249,000) per ship. There are other costs, too. Rose George, author of Deep Sea and Foreign Going, was on board a ship using the Canal a few years ago. She notes that vessels must agree to taking on a Suez crew for the transit.
“[The Suez crew] seem to do nothing but listen to tinny radio and try to sell souvenirs,” says George, adding the ships often have to pay a cigarette ‘tax’.
“On each voyage, Suez costs a ship about £400 ($560) of cigarettes, as well as dozens of chocolate bars from the bond locker.”
These irritations aside, there is also the tricky economics of oil and shipping markets.
For one thing, at the moment traders are playing with what’s called a “contango” – more and more oil and refined oil products are being kept at sea or in storage as traders wait for prices to rise again. Currently there is an oversupply of crude oil around the world, and while we have more crude than we need, the demand for gasoline – a refined oil product – is quite high. This situation has led to volatility in the market and that’s where traders are making their money, says Bockmann.“One of the trading strategies would be that they haven’t sold the cargo and they need additional time,” she points out. She also adds that ships can sometimes be anchored offshore – a situation known as “floating storage” where they simply wait for the market to favour what they have on board. “Floating storage hit a five-year record in December and it hasn’t really dropped that much since then,” Bockmann says.
For ship owners, then, the ball seems to be mostly in their court. They can choose to be at sea longer in certain cases and they can take longer routes, even shopping unsold cargo round various ports in Asia, Africa and Europe, in an attempt to find the right buyer at the right time. The ships must be the right size for a given port, and the products on board need to meet required standards in the local market – but as long as someone suitable does, eventually, buy that cargo at a favourable price, then the traders will do well. If not, they could lose money.
For now some ships have decided to take those additional thousands of miles round the Cape, hoping that at the end of the voyage they’ll come out in profit. It may seem strange – but in the world of oil, sometimes you’re better off taking the long way round.
New range of serious fetal abnormalities linked to Zika: study
March 4, 2016
by Bill Berkrot
Reuters
New York-Fetuses in 29 percent of pregnant women with Zika virus infection were found to have a range of severe abnormalities, according to preliminary results from a small study that raised new concerns about the potential link between Zika and serious birth defects.
The list of “grave outcomes” found in the study of pregnant women in Rio de Janeiro, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, included fetal death, calcification of the brain, placental insufficiency with low to no amniotic fluid, fetal growth restriction and central nervous system damage, including potential blindness.
“These were women infected in the first and second trimester of pregnancy,” Dr. Karin Nielsen, lead author of the study, said in a telephone interview.
“We also saw problems in the last trimester, which was surprising to us,” added Nielsen, noting two cases of fetal death very late in pregnancies in which there was no sign of brain malformation in earlier ultrasound tests.
“We have found a strong link between Zika and adverse pregnancy outcomes, which haven’t been documented before,” said Nielsen, professor of clinical pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Even if the fetus isn’t affected, the virus appears to damage the placenta, which can lead to fetal death.”
Zika infection has been linked to numerous cases in Brazil of the birth defect microcephaly in babies, a condition defined by unusually small heads that can result in developmental problems.
Much remains unknown about Zika, including whether the virus actually causes microcephaly. Brazil said it has confirmed more than 640 cases of microcephaly and considers most to be related to Zika infections in the mothers. Brazil is investigating more than 4,200 additional suspected cases of microcephaly.
Nielsen said microcephaly may be one of many abnormalities in what she referred to as Zika Virus Congenital Syndrome.
A separate case study reported last week in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases described a stillborn baby from a Brazilian mother infected with Zika in which the skull was filled with fluid but had no brain.
The new study was conducted by researchers at UCLA and at the Fiocruz Institute in Brazil. It followed 88 women who went to a Rio de Janeiro clinic between September 2015 and last month, 72 of whom tested positive for Zika. No fetal abnormalities were detected in any of the 16 women who tested negative for Zika.
Among 42 Zika-positive women willing to undergo fetal ultrasound testing, a total of 12, or 29 percent, had abnormal readings.
Eight of the women in the study have delivered babies, including the two stillbirths and two who appeared healthy. Two were born undersized, while a third was born at normal weight but with severe microcephaly, including eye lesions that could indicate blindness. Another was delivered by emergency cesarean section due to no amniotic fluid.
“We do have more babies who seem to have microcephaly that haven’t been born yet,” Nielsen said.
(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; Editing by Will Dunham)