We all have seen the horrific refugee crisis that the many wars in the Middle East has created….millions upon millions trying to find a spot that they can live without worry about their livelihood or their family.
Even if every war in the Middle East was cease today the refugee crisis would not be abated……
Plagued by heat and dust: Desert dust storms such as here in Kuwait could occur more often in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of climate change. In addition, temperatures on very hot days could rise to 50 degrees Celsius on average in the region (approximately 122 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Credit: Molly John, Flickr, Creative Commons
The number of climate refugees could increase dramatically in future. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised. The goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, agreed at the recent UN climate summit in Paris, will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario. The temperature during summer in the already very hot Middle East and North Africa will increase more than two times faster compared to the average global warming. This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century. Such extremely hot days will occur five times more often than was the case at the turn of the millennium. In combination with increasing air pollution by windblown desert dust, the environmental conditions could become intolerable and may force people to migrate.
More than 500 million people live in the Middle East and North Africa – a region which is very hot in summer and where climate change is already evident. The number of extremely hot days has doubled since 1970. “In future, the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa could change in such a manner that the very existence of its inhabitants is in jeopardy,” says Jos Lelieveld, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Professor at the Cyprus Institute.
The news has been horrendous for awhile now with the bad storms the mass killings in Vegas…the only thing that has been missing from the news these days is those pricks in ISIS.
Well most readers know that I keep an eye on terrorism, international relations and conflicts…..just so my readers can to educated for the day…..
It is not news that they are fighting for their very lives in Iraq and Syria and Egypt and Yemen…in other parts of the world.
Have they given up on extending their horrendous attacks beyond the Middle East?
Hell NO! A recent plot here in the US was stomped on……
An alleged plot to attack New York City—detonating bombs in Times Square and the subway system while shooting civilians at concert venues—in the summer of 2016 “in the name of ISIS” was stopped by the FBI, according to newly unsealed records. “Three men allegedly plotted to conduct bombings and shootings in heavily populated areas of New York City during the Islamic holy month of Ramadhan,” ABC News quotes the Justice Department as saying in a statement. A 19-year-old Canadian citizen named Abdulrahman el Bahnasawy allegedly bought materials to make bombs only to send them to what turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, WABC reports. El Bahnasawy was arrested in May 2016 after traveling to the US and renting a cabin in New Jersey.
Also arrested over the past year were two alleged accomplices: 19-year-old Tahla Haroon and 37-year-old Russell Salic. Haroon, an American citizen living in Pakistan, allegedly planned to meet with bomb experts there before joining El Bahnasawy in the US, the New York Daily News reports. Haroon was arrested in Pakistan and is awaiting extradition. Salic was arrested in his native Philippines and is also awaiting extradition. He was allegedly providing financing for the plot. El Bahnasawy has pleaded guilty. He allegedly said he wanted to “create the next 9/11.”
ISIS may be forgotten these days…but they are far from GONE!
OMG! There is so much tension around the world that it is starting to look more like the beginning of the end. I know that sounds a bit much…..but look at the world…..NK is strutting around with its missile in hand, US is verbally threatening so many countries, Turkey is fighting but NO one knows for sure who they are fighting, China, India and Pakistan are all pushing along their borers with each other….and then there is the “games”…all being played in and around the Baltics and Southwest Europe….all along the old borders of the Cold War dividing the USSR from the West.
Right now the US and its NATO allies have a military build-up along said borers and Russia has done likewise….all under the pretense of “war games”.
This September in Europe was a tense month of military posturing and preparations. Sweden recently began a three-week war game, its…
Our Congress is once again on a break (is there ever a time when this isn’t so?) They have tried health issues and failed…..they are talking abut some sort of gun regulations…..and since nothing is sticking to the wall then they will go to the ever popular tax reform.
And since the GOP is in control then we will try their fix for the economy…..supply-side solutions.
This solution has not been a answer for 30+ years….hey, why not try it again?
Our president has decided the “voodoo economics” will solve all the ills of our economy….
Billionaire US President Donald Trump wants to reform the US tax system, like others before him. But his plan looks more like tax cuts for America’s wealthiest and some of the world’s biggest corporations.
Although it’s yet to be fleshed out, it’s based on the idea that the cuts will pay for themselves, with the economic growth they generate in years to come. Yet, that’s never happened in the history of US tax cuts.
In economics jargon: this is a classic supply-side response to a demand-side problem. But why help companies and investors if workers are the ones in trouble?
It’s been done before and George HW Bush famously called it “voodoo economics” to discredit the notion that cutting tax rates will increase revenues.
The Pentagon has a wealth of data at their finger tips and they use it in many ways….one is to predict the outcome of any military action that the US may engage in.
These days analyst play a role as they did back in the day….but today they rely on computers for their extended predictions. All the algorithms and such give the leaders a look at what to expect and they can plan thus.
Even as far back as 50 years ago a computer was used to predict the outcome if the Vietnam War…….
At just about the halfway point of Lynn Novick and Ken Burns’s monumental documentary on the Vietnam War, an army advisor tells an anecdote that seems to sum up the relationship between the military and computers during the mid-1960s.
“There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, ‘You won in 1965.’”
In Saner Thought 