Germany

Who Will Protect the Next Olympics From North Korea?

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By Austin Duckworth – Re-Blogged From Stratfor

In less than six months, the XXIII Olympic Winter Games will begin in Pyeongchang, South Korea. But with an increasingly militant North Korea located less than 161 kilometers (100 miles) away, legitimate concerns have arisen over the event’s potential disruption. Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), recently said he was closely monitoring the situation, adding that it would be a topic of discussion at the committee’s upcoming meeting in Peru. Even so, it’s hard not to wonder who will bear the responsibility of ensuring the safety of athletes and spectators in Pyeongchang. The answer has been constantly evolving for over four decades.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #282

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Houston Flooding – Resilience Needed: America’s great fortune of no major hurricanes (category 3 or above) making landfall ended after almost 12 years. As stated in last week’s TWTW, Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas coast, between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor (east of Corpus Christi) on Friday night. It was a category 4 hurricane with wind speeds of 130-156 mph (113-136 kt; 209-251 km/h). National Weather Service had predicted a storm surge up to 9 to 13 feet (2.7 to 4 meters) and heavy rainfall of 15 to 30 inches (38 to 76 cm) with up to 40 inches (102 cm) in some locations. Later, it degraded to a tropical storm.

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Are Deflationary Forces Here To Stay

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By Sol Palha – Re-Blogged From http://www.Silver-Phoenix500.com

Manufacturing output continues to improve, even though the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. continues to decline and this trend will not stop. While some Jobs have gone overseas, the new trend suggests that automation has eliminated and will continue to eliminate a plethora of jobs. As this trend is in the early phase, the momentum will continue to build in the years to come.

Machines are faster, cheaper and don’t complain; at least not yet. So from a cost cutting and efficiency perspective, there is no reason to stick with humans. This, in turn, will continue to fuel the wage deflation trend. Sal Guatieri an Economist at the Bank of Montreal in a report titled “Wage Against the Machine,” states that automation is responsible for weak wage growth.

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Germany’s Dieselgate

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By Larry Hamlin – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

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The Wall Street Journal published an excellent article further exposing the climate alarmist political idiocy behind Germany’s growing dieselgate scandal where diesel engine powered vehicles were falsely portrayed and promoted as environmentally superior to combustion engine powered vehicles.

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Use and Abuse of History

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By Reva Goujon – Re-Blogged From https://worldview.stratfor.com

A lot of history is being casually tossed around these days. We see it from energized segments of the “alt-right” throwing up Nazi salutes, calling for a “revolution” against “the Bolsheviks” and marching to chants like “Jews will not replace us.” We see it from their anti-fascist adversaries on the left, branding themselves antifa, a movement that draws its roots from the Antifaschistische Aktion resistance from 1930s Germany. We see it from world leaders when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan brazenly calls his German and Dutch counterparts Nazis and fascists and when U.S. President Donald Trump ardently defends Confederate statues as symbols of “heritage not hate.” We see it from jihadist groups like the Islamic State when a member of the Barcelona attack cell calling himself Abu Lais of Cordoba spookily reminds Spanish Christians to remember “the Muslim blood spilled” during the Spanish Inquisition as the group fights to reincorporate “Al Andalus” into a revived caliphate.

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History Is About To Repeat Itself Again…And It Might Get Ugly

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By Shannara Johnson – Re-Blogged From http://www.Gold-Eagle.com

Grant Williams believes that the 76 million retiring Baby Boomers will trigger a major pension crisis. He should know, because he’s been studying financial history and telltale crisis patterns for nearly two decades.

“With that potentially bad situation we could face,” the seasoned asset manager and co-founder of Real Vision TV said in a recent Metal Masters interview, “holding physical metal, somewhere safe, somewhere outside the banking system, is just a sensible precaution to take.”

His outlook has changed drastically since he started his first job trading Japanese markets in 1986: “What I walked into at that time was one of the greatest bull market bubbles the world had ever seen, in the Japanese equity market and real estate market.”

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The Fiscal Benefits Of Free Trade

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By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From http://www.Silver-Phoenix500.com

Western governments have an overriding problem, and that is they have reached or exceeded the bounds of taxation, at a time when legally mandated welfare costs are accelerating. Treasury departments in all the welfare nations are acutely aware of this problem, to which there’s no apparent solution. The economic recovery, so consistently forecast since the great financial crisis, has hardly materialised and has added to the problem.

There is, if treasury economists could only understand it, a solution in free trade.

One of the UK’s leading economists and Brexiteers, Patrick Minford, produced an interesting paper, which brought up this subject. It got little coverage in the press, and even that was extremely negative. Trading on the Future was the only economic modelling exercise that showed significant benefits for Britain from free trade.

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