What I'm Reading: Islam in Asia

Life is about patterns and circles. Patterns of behavior, and the social circles prompting that behavior.  Welcome to Islam!

  By Rich Kozlovich Tags: The World's Nine Orders

Geopolitical Futures reported about the unrest in Afghanistan saying "Taliban commander Juma Khan Fateh threatened to foment a popular uprising in Afghanistan's Badakhshan province after being dismissed from his post as the deputy governor of Zabul province. Fateh was reportedly in a dispute with the Taliban over gold mining operations in Badakhshan, where he was previously based and still has considerable influence. After negotiations on a resolution failed, Fateh was dismissed and is now threatening to rally thousands of fighters against the Taliban, which has begun deploying additional troops to Badakhshan in case of a revolt"

Let's stop being delusional.  Islam corrupt, vile and is all about violence and control.  The true moral foundation of Islam is hate, greed, envy, lust and violence.  What is so hard about that to grasp?  There is unending amount of evidence to support that statement.  What is wrong with the "leaders" of western civilization? For all their education it appears they've never taken a history class that was worth anything, and never read a history book that wasn't filled with leftist fiction from writers like Howard Zinn and Nicole Hannah-Jones race baiting fiction work called the 1619 Project.

1.  Photos from Sharia Law caning in Indonesia.
2. Anti-Islamization Party Tops Polls in Australia
3.  India: 40-Strong Muslim Mob Attacks And Kills Hindu Man Over Water Dispute
4.  Pakistan Can’t Rewrite Civilization
5.  Afghanistan: Taliban Opens Fire on Anti-Burqa Protest, Killing Boy
6.  Iranian Agents Lived in Australia Before Directing Anti-Jewish Attacks on Sydney and Melbourne
7.  Aussie Judges Issues Secret Order Protecting Muslims Who Threatened to Kill Jews
8.  These Christian Girls from Pakistan Were Forced Into Marriage by Muslims
9.  Taliban Open Fire on Women Protesting the Islamic Dress Code.
10. Every Sunrise Brings Fresh Humiliation for Pakistani Christians - " they raise the same clamor that Islam is a religion of tolerance and forbearance which commands good treatment even with kafirs, whereas the reality on the ground is exactly the opposite of this."  "The true teachings of Islam are filled with malice, hatred, contempt, and discriminatory inferior treatment full of killing and plundering towards non-Muslim kafirs — Christians, Jews, and Hindus. Whoever does not accept Islam has been trained to be humiliated and disgraced at every step."
11. Where Are the Moderate Muslims?
12.  ‘I’ll F**k Your God’s Sister’
13.  Dealing With Islamic Extremism: How The Soviets Did It  - Actually, I remember this, and one thing the Russians understood about Islamists.  The only thing they respect is power and the willingness to use it.  Keyser Söze would have been the hero of Russian agents, and the Islamists,  who insist they love death, understood they would more than willing to fulfill their wish, brutally. 
14.  The Tenets Of Islam: License To Kill
15.  Pakistan’s Top Court Acquits Last Three Men in 2014 Lynching of Christian Couple

Market-Driven Growth and the Asian Tigers

June 11, 2022 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’m currently in Tanzania as part of a speaking tour in Africa. My remarks today largely repeated the message I gave to an audience last week in Nigeria.

So I won’t bother sharing anything from my presentation. Instead, I want to highlight some numbers from a presentation by Professor Ken Schoolland.

He shared some data showing how the “Asian Tigers” grew far faster than major Latin American nations between 1950 and 2000.

These are very impressive examples of convergence (as the Asian Tigers caught up with Latin America) followed by divergence (as the Tigers then continued to grow much faster).

I’ll be adding this data to my “anti-convergence club.”

But I also noticed that Professor Schoolland was sharing some old data from 1995.

So I went to the Maddison website and created some new charts based on the latest-available data.

As you can see, the Latin American nations were richer in 1950, but they have not enjoyed fast growth in the past 70 years.

By contrast, the Asian Tigers have enjoyed spectacular growth since 1950.

So not only are these nations much more prosperous than nations in Latin America, in most cases they have even surpassed European countries and Singapore is now richer than the United States.

Since I’m writing about the success of the Asian Tigers, let’s address the myth that they became rich because of industrial policy.

Sam Gregg of the Acton Institute examined this controversy in an article for Law & Liberty.

…what about some of the East Asian Tiger countries? Aren’t they proof that, when devised and implemented by wise governments guided by even cleverer experts, industrial policy can work? …There is, however, a wealth of evidence indicating that these policies produced similarly pedestrian outcomes in these countries. As for the Tigers, what primarily took them from the status of economic backwaters to first-world economies was economic liberalization and especially trade openness… 

Even the most devoted industrial policy advocates hesitate to present two of the Tigers, Singapore and Hong Kong, as industrial policy successes. They do nevertheless regard South Korea and Taiwan’s postwar histories as demonstrating why industrial policy should play a major role.

Gregg takes a close look at what actually happened in South Korea.

Beginning in 1954 and until about 1963, Korea’s government focused upon import-substitution industrialization policies… however,…economic growth in Korea only began taking off between 1963 and 1973 following a decisive shift towards export-orientated development and trade openness. … 

Industrial policy assumed a larger place in Korea’s economy in the mid-1970s. …Korea’s turn towards industrial policy in this period does not appear to have produced spectacular results. Economic growth during this period—whether in terms of GDP, trade, employment, manufacturing output, or exports in goods and services—was actually lower than what had been realized in the 1960s. …These results may help explain why Korea’s drift towards industrial policy was reversed, beginning in the late-1970s. … 

The overall result was a return to high growth throughout Korea’s economy.

And here’s his analysis of what happened in Taiwan.

…the Kuomintang government adopted an import-substitution approach to trade characterized by high tariffs and import quotas. The Taiwan Production Board oversaw the extensive use of industrial policy, especially through preferential loan-treatment… In the mid-1950s, key Taiwanese officials and their American advisors recognized that Taiwan could not keep going down this path. 

Hence in the late-1950s, decisions were made that re-orientated Taiwan’s economy towards competition and trade openness by, among other things, liberalizing imports and foreign investment rules as well as beginning a process of steadily removing export controls and gradually giving more and more exporters what amounted to a free trade status. 

As in Korea’s case, growth in Taiwan took off. …the general direction of Taiwan’s economy from 1958 onwards was away from industrial policy and tariffs and towards increasing integration into global markets. Like Korea, Taiwan underwent a limited return to interventionist policies in the mid-1970s, but, again, like Korea, this did not last.

The bottom line is that South Korea and Taiwan are not as rich as Hong Kong and Singapore and one reason they are lagging is that their governments tried to pick winners and losers.

But both those nations largely have abandoned industrial policy, so at least they recognized their mistakes.

P.S. A big issue at the conference is whether the “China Model” should be emulated. I shared some data showing why that would be a big mistake.

 

Historical Evidence Proves There Were No SUVs in the Medieval Warm Period

by Blaise Vanne | Oct 27, 2021 | Climate Change, Feature 3, Politics

Editor's Note:  I don't have permission to publish this in full, so if the Author takes exception I will take it down and link it.  However, this piece is so profound it needs published in full with the widest possible distribution. RK  

The global elite is working overtime on the next “climate emergency,” which will be joined at the hip with a blockchain-based “Fedcoin,” or similar. Want to buy and sell? Get groceries? If you go over your allotted carbon allowance (same misanthropes, no doubt, as the Covid vax doubters!), you will be cut off. But how real is anthropogenic global warming?

One hint comes from Farley Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, who wrote in his book West Viking (while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History reports, 

“… Erik the Red discovered two areas of southwest Greenland which were suitable for farming, with grasslands and small stands of alder and birch.” 

 You will note, of course, that it is too cold today for any type of forest to grow in Greenland, and there is zero ability to farm⏤unless modern technologies are utilized. Even then, crop selection is very minimal. Mowat also reported the Arctic pack ice was much less in that Viking discovery era than today. Dr. Fred Singer wrote in Unstoppable Global Warming⏤every 1,500 Years that when the Vikings first settled Greenland, they grew vegetables. It was warm enough to allow the population to grow to 3,000 people (the Smithsonian site says the Viking population reached a zenith of 5,000 people). By 1100 AD, the place was thriving enough that they had their own bishop and twelve churches. Nature reported in a 2010 article that clamshell studies also confirm Norse records.

Meanwhile, the Archeological Survey of Canada has also noted around A.D. 1000; a warmer climate resulted in the tree line advancing 100 kilometers north of its present position.” (See Archeological Survey of Canada, Canada’s Visual History, The Little Ice and the Historic Inuit.) The results of this? Especially in northern Europe, where we have most records, the period between 1150 and 1300 was truly a flowering period, for population reached unprecedented levels that were never to be seen again until the late 18th century in many countries; the English population experienced a staggering threefold increase in its population during the last century since the Domesday Survey in 1086. 

This climate optimum coincided with a period of increased solar activity, which is a critical element of the global warming equation. Farming of various crops extended hundreds of kilometers farther north than it is possible today.

 

Yet, in the 1100s, Greenland cooled dramatically, briefly stabilized, and then dropped even further in the 1200s to the early 1400s. Sirocko (2010) places the earlier event at the beginning of the 1310s. A more commonly accepted time frame for the first cold phase is the coinciding solar minimum called Wolf minimum from 1280-1350, per Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2000, Heidelberg Lexikon der Geowissenschaften. There were repeated cold snaps and advancing glaciers and sea ice from that time onward, but it was not until the early 1600’s that the most devastating effects of the Little Ice Age began to set in, which is the more commonly used date for its beginning. As Dale Mackenzie Brown writes in The Fate of Greenland’s Vikings, in Archeology.org, An ice core drilled from the island’s (Greenland’s) massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off; in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.” The recent recovery in temperatures is only putting us back to the average temps from an earlier age!

Indeed, when I was visiting Iceland at Skaftafell Nat’l Park two years ago, Icelandic historians know from extant Viking deeds and have put in the displays at the park, that somewhere around FORTY old Viking era farms are currently buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (the largest in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica). In other words, it was simply much warmer in the Icelandic settlement era than it is today.

We are routinely informed of the melting of Greenland glaciers today at lower altitudes, but demonstrably there are at bare minimum low altitude glaciers in roughly the same geographic area that had seen more melting and more pronounced glacial recession one thousand years ago than we see today. Al Gore may want to visit Skaftafell National Park in Iceland on one of his many jet-setting, carbon-burning trips to check the facts himself. 

There are records of grape growing occurring in places in northern Europe back during this optimum where they can’t grow today. Gregory McNamee, in the Weather Guide Calendar (Accord Publishing, 2002) noted that wine connoisseurs might have gone to England for fine vintages (can’t grow fine vintage grapes there today!), that heat-loving trees like beeches carpeted Europe far into Scandinavia, and Viking ships crossed iceberg free oceans to ice-free harbors in Iceland. Art Horn writes that In the winter of 1249, it was so warm in England that people did not need winter clothes. They walked about in summer dress. It was so warm people thought the seasons had changed. There was no frost in England the entire winter. Can you imagine what NOAA would say if that happened next year?

On the other side of the world, research by Panin and Nefedov in 2010 analyzed rivers and lakes in the Upper Volga, and Upper Zapadnaya Dvina areas in Russia⏤also found evidence of a Medieval climatic optimum in that part of the world. Even worse for the anthropogenic warmers, recent research has found evidence for the Medieval Climatic Optimum in the central Peruvian Andes, southern South America, China, where author XJ Zhou notes temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period are comparable to those in the current warm period over China. Also, in Antarctica, per Li, Y., Cole-Dai, J. and Zhou, L. 2009 in their article Glaciochemical evidence in an East Antarctica ice core of a recent (AD 1450-1850) neoglacial episode – see Journal of Geophysical Research 114: 10.1029/2008JD011091. Further evidence of an Antarctic LIA and MWP is found here. Or you could trek north to the opposite pole, on Canada’s Arctic Ocean, where you can see below a picture of a white spruce found on Canada’s Arctic Ocean⏤far above today’s tree line.

 

Picea glauca (white spruce) stump on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula in the tundra, some 100km north of the current treeline. Photo by Professor Ritchie (University of Toronto). The radiocarbon date was 4940 ±140 years Before Present (B.P.) and was featured in Hubert Lamb’s classic work Climate, Present, Past, and Future. Climatologist Dr. Tim Ball summarizes this here. 

Similarly, two papers, reported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one in Earth-Science Reviews and the other in Chinese Science Bulletin, reported studies of key chemical contents in micro-drilled giant clams shells and coral samples to demonstrate that in the South China Sea, the warm period of the Middle Ages was warmer than the present. The scientists examined surveys of the ratio of strontium to calcium content and heavy oxygen isotopes; both are sensitive recorders of sea surface temperatures past and present. The aragonite bicarbonate of the Tridacna gigas clamshell is so fine-grained that daily growth lines are exposed by micro-drilling with an exceptionally fine drill-bit, allowing an exceptionally detailed time-series of sea-temperature changes to be compiled – a feat of detection worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself. By using overlaps between successive generations of giant clams and corals, the three scientists – Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Yuhong Wang of Fudan University, Shanghai⏤reconstructed a record of sea-surface temperature changes going back 2500 years. The Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods both showed up prominently in the western Pacific and East Asia. Sea surface temperatures varied considerably over the 2500 year period. See also here for a second story. 

Dr. Soon concludes: The U.N.’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in the South China Sea, too.

Another study by earth sciences professor Zunli Lu (formerly of Oxford, then Syracuse Univ.) studied samples of crystal called ikaite, which forms in cold water, which melts at room temperature. Samples were taken by Lu and colleagues, examined for variation caused by temperature fluctuations during formation, and dated. The result? Lu writes: This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula. What does this mean, practically? The MWP was not simply a localized event in northern Europe, or even the northern hemisphere. And if it was as warm 1,000 years ago as it is now all over the world, Al Gore is simply wrong. The details are summarized by the UK Register here. 

In a study by Kobashi, et al., entitled Summit Surface Snow Temperatures of Greenland, there is further corroboration of Dr. Tim Ball’s contention that the MWP was real. In sum, this study illustrated Greenland surface snow temperature variability over the past 4000 years at the GISP2 site (near the Summit of the Greenland ice sheet) with a new method that utilizes argon and nitrogen isotopic ratios from occluded air bubbles. In so doing, the eight researchers report that the average Greenland snow temperature over the past 4000 years was -30.7°C, while the current decadal (2001-2010) surface temperature at the Greenland Summit is -29.9°C, which they say is as warm as it was there in the 1930s-1940s. And they add that there was another similarly warm period (-29.7°C) in the 1140s (Medieval Warm Period), indicating that the present decade is not outside the envelope of the variability of the last 1000 years. Even more telling, prior to the last millennium, they report there were 72 decades warmer than the present one, meaning temperatures were 1.0 to 1.5°C warmer. In fact, they found that during two intervals (~1300 BP and ~3360 BP), centennial average temperatures were nearly 1.0°C warmer (-28.9°C) than in the present decade.

This proves without a doubt that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about Greenland’s recent relative warmth, as it is clear that much warmer temperatures have been experienced there over many prior prolonged periods without any help from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. There is no valid reason to believe that mankind’s burning of coal, gas, and oil has had, or is having any measurable impact on the climate of that part of the world, or any other part of the planet.

A similar study from Yan, Soon, and Wang concluded, from studies of the ratio of strontium to calcium content and heavy oxygen isotopes in corals and Tridacna gigas (giant clams), that these warm periods also occurred in the East Asia/Western Pacific area (see Earth-Science Reviews, Dec. 13, 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2014.12.003)

One further fascinating study which corroborates the MWP was a study by Belt et al. in 2007, described here, where scientists used a biomarker (IP₂₅), which authors Vare et al. (2009) describe as a mono-unsaturated highly-branched isoprenoid that is synthesized by sea ice diatoms that have been shown to be stable in sediments below Arctic sea ice. The NIPCC reports concludes: Based on IP₂₅ data obtained from a marine sediment core retrieved from Barrow Strait (74°16.05’N, 91°06.38’W), which they compared with complementary proxy data obtained from analysis of other organic biomarkers, stable isotope composition of bulk organic matter, benthic foraminifera, particle size distributions and ratios of inorganic elements, the five U.K. scientists of Vare et al. developed a spring sea ice record for that part of the central Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Results indicated evidence for a decrease in spring sea ice between approximately 1200 and 800 years before present (B.P. which was followed by an increase in sea ice over the last 400 years of their record (between 800 and 400 years B.P. (emphasis mine). Even into North America, in the first Medieval Warm Period, the Rocky Mountains had a snow line 1,000 feet higher than today.

Research by the Chinese show similar warm periods on the other side of the world, including one report noting in the northeast of China During the last 500 years, apparent climate fluctuations were experienced, including two cold phases from the 1470s to the 1710s and the 1790s to the 1860s, two warm phases from the 1720s to the 1780s, and after the 1870s. The temperature variations prior to the 1500s show two anomalous warm peaks, around 300 and between approximately 1100 and 1200, that exceed the warm level of the last decades of the 20th century.

Lord Christopher Monckton of England has noted, Scores of scientific papers show that the Medieval warm period was real, global, and up to [5 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than now…Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes; today, they’re there (in fact, the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina has been expanding quite handily the past few decades. There were Viking farms in Greenland; now, they’re under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole – a Chinese naval squadron sailed right around the Arctic in 1421 and found none. One can infer there were warm as well as cool periods within the centuries-long larger trend lines – clearly this was during one of the short warm periods in the overall downward trend and the Chinese fleet may well have sailed during one of these warmer respites. As we see even today, there are counter-cyclical short-term trends, and not only meteorologically, but even within areas such as stock indices). And not only did the Chinese find little ice in 1421, 500 years later, John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, noted around 1900 that the Northwest Passage was clear of ice during another short period of warmth.

The fact is, the Medieval (and earlier Roman and Minoan) Warm Periods were not just restricted to Europe, as frantic warmers try to claim. Even former lead warmer Phil Jones of East Anglia University – the lead location for the AGW scam – was forced to admit that there is no consensus on global warming after the ClimateGate scam came to light in 2010, stating about climate debate being settled This is not my view… There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties.

Subsequent to the Medieval Climatic Optimum noted above, the Greenland historical records show there was a severe drop in temps, which initially started around 1100 AD, briefly plateaued, then dropped even further through the late 1400s, only finally to sharply rise again very roughly around 1500 (by this time the Vikings had been frozen out of Greenland, and there were none left residing there), followed by a precipitous fall again starting later in the 1500s to the temperature nadirs of the Little Ice Age very roughly around the time of the American Revolution. Importantly, each of these optimums – the ones very roughly centered around 1000 AD and 1500 AD were far above today’s supposedly record high temperatures Al Gore frantically is warning us about. (Meanwhile, in the global freeze out between those two optimums, Chinese records show centuries-old citrus orchards froze, the Thames froze up to 5′ in-depth (see Civil Defense Perspectives, July 2001, vol 17, #5, p. 1) and James Aber writes around 1215 in the Alps, an oberriederin (irrigation canal) was overrun by (the) advance of the Aletsch glacier; (with) the canal head still covered by the modern Aletsch glacier to this very day. Around the same time, the passage from Iceland to Greenland became impassable around the mid-1300s due to sea ice expansion, with Greenland soon abandoned. (In this article, the author also notes in this article that skeletal remains from Hvalsey church in Greenland show that values from tooth enamel indicate sharply colder temperatures during this era of cooling.) 

Physicist Russell Rickert has also reviewed Viking agricultural settlements in Greenland that had to be abandoned after 1300 AD and states that there was a severe drop in temps sometime after the MWP (the last supply ship to get through the ice was reportedly 1406, with three other ships earlier in 1381, 1382 and 1385, per Jared M Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed). Diamond noted while we don’t know precisely when the last Viking Greenlander died, in the 1400s the North Atlantic became colder and stormier. Any mention in Viking records of ship traffic to Greenland ceased at that time. Diamond also noted a radiocarbon date of 1435 for a woman’s dress excavated from Herjolfsnes churchyard, suggesting people may have survived a few years after the last supply ship to reach Greenland. Diamond agrees that the Greenlander Norse went through several runs of cold years in the 1300s. Then the temperatures plunged in the 1400s, which cold lasted until the 1800s (he appears to be speaking in broad outlines, as there were warm spikes during this downward temperature trend). 

More evidence for the MWP. France’s Burgundy region, renowned for their wines for centuries, has kept records of grape harvest data going back to the end of the Medieval Optimum, from which researchers constructed a temperature graph which shows – you guessed it – slight cooling overall since that era. While carbon dioxide was as much as 100 ppm less, this research shows the 1300s, 1400, and 1600 were warmer than today.

The truth is, there has been global warming recently – but it started around the time of the Revolutionary war, and is today still BELOW the average of the past 3,000 years. And this is not just for Europe, Greenland, and North America, yet another red herring that has recently been thrown out by the desperate global warmers. The universality of the Viking and Medieval climatic optimums is written about by Kegwin, who wrote in Science, 1996:274:1504-1508, the mean surface temp of the Sargasso Sea (which lies roughly between the West Indies and the Azores), which was obtained by readings of isotope ratios in marine organism remains in the sediment, shows we are, today, below the three thousand year average, and far below the Medieval Climatic Optimum. See further reports documenting this here or here. Is There Evidence for the Medieval Warm Period? This also reviews the MWP from New Zealand through China and back to Europe – finding it was as warm, or warmer than today. Civil Defense Perspectives, Mar. 2007, Vol. 23, #3, p. 1, notes that evidence for this climatic optimum has been found in all but 2 out of 103 locations where it was examined, including Asia, Africa, South America, and the western U.S. (See Dr. Willie Soon, et al., Energy Environ 2003; 14 (2,3):233-296 for another report on this). But the following graph of the Kegwin research, of temperature in the Sargasso Sea, tells you all you need to know (note: that big horizontal line running across the page is the 3,000-year average!). Interestingly, the warmer times coincided not only with the best harvests, but also the least amount of major storm activity. 

 

If you would like corroboration of Kegwin’s study, Dr. Roy Spencer has a similar chart found at www.drroyspencer.com, where he charts temperatures for the past two thousand years. Similarly, a Russian study by Dergachev and Raspopov, found, as reported in the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, that a detailed 750-year temperature reconstruction from an ice core in Siberia agrees well with measures of solar modulation based on sunspot number and carbon-14 and Be-10 estimates, and that the agreement is remarkable at multi-decadal time scales, and concluded that Dergachev and Raspopov compare the solar indices of the past millennium with the borehole temperature reconstructions, demonstrating that the borehole data and solar indices agree on the long-term temperature pattern of the past thousand years. That is to say; the two parameters imply the existence of a solar-induced Medieval Warm Period (MWP) around AD 1000 to 1300 and a Little Ice Age (LIA) in the 1600s to 1700s. Thus, their study pretty much proves the existence of a global MWP, while demonstrating the link between the MWP-LIA oscillation and solar activity. And it indicates that the MWP was roughly as warm as — or possibly even warmer than — it has been to date during the Current Warm Period. Graph for this here. 

More evidence of the MWP was published in 2010, including a study by Billeaud, Tessier, and Lesueur in  2009 of the area around Mont-Saint-Michel Bay, France, showing that the Holocene has been regularly punctuated by warming periods, occurring every 1500 years, +/- 500 years. The MWP also existed in Central Asia, as summarized by the NIPCC of an article by Chen, et al. Moisture changes over the last millennium in arid central Asia: A review, synthesis, and comparison with monsoon region, published in Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 1055-1068. 

Even the Chinese are in on the act: CM Ma, et al., analyzed multi-proxy data, including, in their words, “¹⁴C, grain size, microfossil, plant seeds, and geochemical elements — which they obtained from sediment retrieved from excavations made in the dry lake bed of Lop Nur China’s West Lake (40°27’129″ N, 90°20’083″ E) — in order to amply discuss, as they describe it, the climate and environment changes during the MWP (Medieval Warm Period), which they identified as occurring between AD 900 and 1300. So what did they find?… Ma, et al. conclude that ‘the environment was the best…temperature was almost the same [as] or a little higher than [italics added] nowadays.”

Once again, one can see that Mr. Gore and his green minions have confused the emergence from the mini-ice age with anthropogenic global warming. 

In case you need yet more evidence of the Medieval Climatic Optimum, the NIPC.org cites a study by Kobashi et al. (2010) wherein Greenland, oxygen isotopes of ice (Stuiver et al., 1995) have been extensively used as a temperature proxy, but the data are noisy and do not clearly show multi-centennial trends for the last 1,000 years in contrast to borehole temperature records that show a clear ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998).” However, they note that nitrogen (N) and argon (Ar) isotopic ratios — ¹⁵N/¹⁴N and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁶Ar, respectively — can be used to construct a temperature record that is not seasonally biased, and does not require any calibration to instrumental records, and resolves decadal to centennial temperature fluctuations.” And what does this study by Kobashi, et al., show? See for yourself: 

 

In Italy, at the NIPC reports, Working with stalagmite SV1 from Grotta Savi — a cave located at the southeast margin of the European Alps in Italy (45°37’05” N, 13°53’10” E) — Frisia et al. (2005) developed a 17,000-year record of speleothem calcite δ¹⁸O_C data, which they calibrated against “a reconstruction of temperature anomalies in the Alps” that was developed by Luterbacher et al. (2004) for the last quarter of the past millennium.”

This work clearly shows that between the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, there was a cold period, but at least during with MWP, it was as warm as, if not warmer, than today. And I am pretty sure Al Gore and his green fasco-Marxists cannot blame that on Medieval SUVs, though perhaps that will be next in the fake news. 

Viewpoint: Greenpeace continues campaign to scuttle Philippines' vitamin A-enriched Golden Rice approval, but government holds firm

By AC Bushnell, Phil Harvey | October 26, 2021 

  COVID-19 has caused untold suffering throughout the world, but particularly in developing countries. So why is Greenpeace continuing a yearslong campaign against a food product that could deliver dramatic health benefits to children in some of the poorest parts of the world? 

That’s the question we’ve been asked several times since the group recently announced its opposition to a decision by regulators in the Philippines to approve a permit for farmers to grow a breed of rice that’s fortified with vitamin A. The battle is emblematic of the way in which baseless fears about technology are used as a cudgel to deny people — most of them poor — opportunities to realize better health and higher living standards. 

More than 140 million children throughout the world experience vitamin A deficiency. The result is blindness for as many as 500,000 of these children each year, while countless others are afflicted with measles, severe diarrhea, and stunting. A lack of vitamin A is also a threat for millions of pregnant women, potentially causing night blindness and other maladies. Families in the countries where vitamin A deficiency is greatest have minimal access to foods that could otherwise supply it, such as carrots and spinach.......To Read More......

The World As I See It: Asia Post Coronavirus

 By Rich Kozlovich  

Editor's Note:  I wrote this piece back in August and it got stuck in my draft file, forgotten, but while I've updated it, the issues and conclusions remain the same. RK

I keep reading how America needs to make some kind of accommodation with China.  One that would be to China's benefit.  Hogwash!  The economic outlook of Asia is at best tenuous and China has brought it on itself.  We owe them nothing, they owe us everything.  If Richard Nixon hadn't opened China to trade almost 40 years ago, they would have probably gone broke, much to the world's benefit.  From that point on, through our trade agreements, we've been funding their efforts - military, social and economic - to destroy America.  How smart is that? 

We need to learn this once and for all.  Corporations are, at the best of times, leaky vessels as allies, and their cat's paws in government are even worse. President Trump's China policies exposed this outrage to the point it was obvious to the most casual observer.  So obvious even the media got it.  Biden's policies will make it worse.

China has so many economic and social issues that have now caught up to them for their corrupt dealings and actions they cannot afford any kind of economic downturn without serious consequences. Their demographics are out of whack when it comes to gender, meaning because of abortions there are too many men with too few women.  The ethnic groups in China hate the ethnic Han who make up most of China and run the Chinese Communist Party. 

Instead of allowing Hong Kong to continue being a big economic engine for China, the Chinese Communist Party has pretty much crushed Hong Kong's efforts to maintain their level of autonomy in fear that autonomous mentality will spread to the rest of China. 

Chinese politics is all about power and control, not good economics! Hong Kong is an ugly display of that policy. But understand this:  That's foundational to socialism.  Communism and fascism being forms of socialism; two sides of the same coin; but the end results are always the same. Misery, suffering and unending injustice. 

As this piece in Epoch Times point out:

Beijing’s announcement last week that it would pass a national security law for Hong Kong—bypassing the city’s own legislature—has attracted international condemnation and reignited mass protests in the city, with plans for more in the coming weeks.

The end result in all of this:

Following Beijing’s move, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on May 27 that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from the mainland, putting Hong Kong’s special trading status with the United States in jeopardy.

It appears the business people in Hong Kong seem to believe the CCP intends on destroying Hong Kong as it's currently configures, and growth there has halted.  Business people are moving out literally, and figuratively by putting their money elsewhere.

As for Tibet, they've been having small revolts forever, and it's clear if the CCP can't maintain their massive army economically the non-Han ethnic groups will rebel.

Making a comparison between our mistaken views about Soviet capability during the Cold War George Friedman who heads up the subscription site Geopolitical Futures (Editor's Note: I recommend subscribing to this site. RK)  notes in his article, Why There Won’t Be a War With China:

The United States overestimated the Soviets for a number of reasons. First, a key principle of war is to never underestimate the enemy. It is a principle that should be used prudently. Second, the Americans underestimated their own capabilities. They saw their weakness without understanding that war is a confrontation less of strength and more of comparative weakness. They were blind to the Soviet weakness and were frightened by their own.

He went on to say:

This comports with the Russian operating principle of Maskirovka – the masquerade that makes small men look large and weak countries look strong. It worked so well that the U.S. spent the 1980s creating weapons it could afford and for which it had troops who could operate them. It’s the competition that broke the Russians.

The Chinese are playing the same game, but like Russia, the Chinese don't really have the capability to extend their power much beyond their borders and are totally incapable of maintaining an attacking or occupying force beyond their very short supply lines.  Nor, in spite of their huge army, they don't have the people capable of executing such actions. 

What about the differences between China's military capabilities and America's.  China's understanding about war has been all internal, either civil war, and of course the invasion by the Japanese during WWII.  But they are incapable of extending their power much beyond their territory, furthermore they have no capability to maintain any force they might send much beyond their immediate supply lines, which are short at best.  Furthermore, although they have a huge military, is it equipped with the people necessary to carry out such actions? 

We also need to recognize the reality of the Chinese economy versus America's. 

They have huge coal deposits but no oil by any meaningful measure, which is the reason they're willing to start small aggressive object lesson actions with Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.  Oil deposits!

China has to import huge volumes of oil from the Middle East, and that oil has to travel through the Straits of Malay, which could easily be stopped by any naval power in the region, no matter how small. India and Japan have substantial forces to bring into play, and Indonesia and even the Philippines with their largely littoral navy could play havoc with any transports. That’s why China has been working the Road and Belt Initiative to bypass all of that. Unfortunately for them they just can’t help themselves. Commies will always be commies.  That’s turning sour because basically they're communists, and that makes them bullies, and those who’ve signed on are starting to back off.

China desperately wants to fill any void America abandons regarding geopolitical control. America has been the guarantor for the stability of the current economic and military world order since the end of WWII, but that’s going to change.

This coronavirus scam has done one thing that's proven to be worthwhile.  While many of us have recognized who and what China is, that hasn't been true for much of the world due to clabber from writers and politicians.  Coronavirus has exposed China for who they are.  The economic consequence of all this will force the CCP into untenable situations, and as in the case of all totalitarian regimes, they're resort of aggression.  But they will be no war.  

In Germany there were still 50,000 American troops stationed there. Why? The Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia, no matter what blather anyone puts out, is not in any position economically, socially or demographically capable of attacking Europe.   Oh, it’s true, without American forces to stop them they could easily march across the North European Plain straight over into France without too much trouble, but what happens after they get there?  They can’t hold it, they can’t maintain that kind of army presence, and economically and demographically they can’t even defend their homeland. And Putin, in spite of his public posturing, knows it.   And even now, all of that is still true, but they're not dealing with a chess master any longer.  They're dealing with Biden and Company, and they don't even play checkers, and they will take advantage of that in as many ways as possible.

As for why American troops are still there:  They’re still there because every time closing those bases is discussed, the German government screams how devastating that will be to their economy. They take the money they should be spending for their own defense and spend it on social programs that are unsustainable. In short, the American taxpayer is paying for Germany’s social programs. That’s going to change, even with Biden's globalist policies. 

• Transformation, Biden, And The Left

The social and economic stability in the rest of the world is going to become difficult.  During the Trump administration I expected to see companies moving back to the United States by the end of what would be his second term.  That' still my long term expectation, but now it may take a little longer. 

Trump wasn't impressed or intimidated by the Chinese, the EU, Russia, N. Korea or Muslim extremists, but unfortunately we now have a President who is both, and that's compounded by serious intellectual and neurological issues.  And he's surrounded by radicals as advisers, including his Vice President.

Obama was playing checkers while the EU, China, North Korea and Russia was playing chess.  During the Trump years they were dealing with a Grand Master, and didn't like the results, and make no mistake about it, there wasn't going to be a war.   But now, we have invertebrates in office, and nothing triggers aggressive action like appeasers and fools, and they're not even playing checkers.