Baltic Dry Index. 850 -28 Brent Crude 50.36
"[M]any publications now claiming the world is on the brink
of a global warming disaster said the same about an impending ice
age – just 30 years ago. Several major ones, including The New
York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek, have reported on three or even four
different climate
shifts since 1895."
We open with the big
news of yesterday, the USA pulling out of the mistaken, 2015 global mania agreement to fight,
rebranded and relaunched, “climate change.” I suspect it will just be the first
of many in the decades ahead, as forecast “climate change” fails to live up to
the flawed and imperfect computer models. But for now media, and socialist,
snowflake outrage, are in full hue and cry at America dropping the 1990s socialist
fad.
Much ado about nothing, is likely to be the verdict of history, since the
planet hasn’t been warming in almost two decades, though no one knows why. Last
time I checked, the Himalayas still had its glaciers, and the Polar Bears were
still eating unwary scientists and tourists. I’m old enough to remember the
1960s, when the media fad and mania back then was the coming new ice age, due
to hit about now.
Below, the media mania
frenzy after the President Trump action.
Whenever you find yourself on
the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain.
Trump abandons global climate pact; allies voice dismay
President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would withdraw the United
States from the landmark 2015 global agreement to fight climate change, a move
that fulfilled a major campaign pledge but drew condemnation from U.S. allies
and business leaders.
Trump, tapping into the "America First" message he used when
he was elected president last year, said the Paris accord would undermine the
U.S. economy, cost U.S. jobs, weaken American national sovereignty and put the
country at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world.
"We don't want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any
more. And they won't be," Trump said.
"The same nations asking us to stay in the agreement are the
countries that have collectively cost America trillions of dollars through
tough trade practices and in many cases lax contributions to our critical
military alliance," Trump added.
Supporters of the accord, including some leading U.S. business figures,
called Trump's move a blow to international efforts to curb the warming of the
planet that threatens far-reaching consequences for this century and beyond.
Former Democratic President Barack Obama expressed regret over the pullout from
a deal he was instrumental in brokering.
More
Trump Cedes Climate Policy Leadership to Xi With Paris Accord Exit
by David TweedTrump’s move to pull the U.S. out of the almost 200-nation deal, which risks undermining the commitment of other countries to limit fossil-fuel emissions, has drawn sharp criticism from key American allies across Europe and Asia. But Trump, in a speech Thursday at the White House, said the accord undermined U.S. interests, sent taxpayer money abroad and didn’t require enough from other nations, singling out China and India.
“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries
gaining a financial advantage over the U.S.,” Trump said, making good on a
campaign pledge last year to “cancel” participation in the agreement. The
landmark deal sealed in 2015 brought together the U.S. and European Union, as
well as big developing nations like China, India and Brazil, in pledging limits
on fossil-fuel pollution and funds to help poorer countries adapt to climate
change.
With the decision, the U.S. is now deeply isolated on climate change
policy. It joins Syria and Nicaragua outside the Paris consensus, which
includes governments as divergent as Saudi Arabia and North Korea.
More
Trump misunderstood MIT climate research, university officials say
Massachusetts Institute of Technology officials said U.S. President
Donald Trump badly misunderstood their research when he cited it on Thursday to
justify withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Trump announced during a speech at the White House Rose Garden that he
had decided to pull out of the landmark climate deal, in part because it would
not reduce global temperatures fast enough to have a significant impact.
"Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total
compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths
of one degree Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100,"
Trump said.
"Tiny, tiny amount."
That claim was attributed to research conducted by MIT, according to
White House documents seen by Reuters. The Cambridge, Massaschusetts-based
research university published a study in April 2016 titled "How much of a
difference will the Paris Agreement make?" showing that if countries
abided by their pledges in the deal, global warming would slow by between 0.6
degree and 1.1 degrees Celsius by 2100.
"We certainly do not support the withdrawal of the U.S. from the
Paris agreement," said Erwan Monier, a lead researcher at the MIT
Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and one of the
study's authors.
"If we don't do anything, we might shoot over 5 degrees or more and
that would be catastrophic," said John Reilly, the co-director of the
program, adding that MIT's scientists had had no contact with the White House
and were not offered a chance to explain their work.
More
France, Italy, Germany defend Paris Accord, say cannot be renegotiated
Italy, France and Germany said on Thursday they regretted U.S. President
Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord and dismissed
his suggestion that the global pact could be revised.
"We deem the momentum generated in Paris in December 2015
irreversible and we firmly believe that the Paris Agreement cannot be
renegotiated since it is a vital instrument for our planet, societies and
economies," the leaders of the three countries said in a rare joint
statement.
Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
and French President Emmanuel Macron urged their allies to speed up efforts to
combat climate change and said they would do more to help developing countries
adapt.
The three leaders tried to convince Trump last week at a Group of Seven
summit to stay in the pact and honor U.S. commitments undertaken by the
previous administration.
In a speech at the White House, Trump said the U.S. would look to
renegotiate the agreement and condemned what he called "draconian"
financial and economic burdens imposed by the deal.
The unusual French-Italian-German statement, released barely an hour
after Trump announced his decision, underscored the disappointment of the eurozone's
three largest economies and their resolve to plow ahead without Washington's
support.
More
We close for the day with typical EUSSR fudge. Who cares
about the rules, we’ve got the power. Below, Italy gets half of a fig leaf
cover, to bailout the world’s oldest and wonkiest bank. Everything that’s wrong
with the unreformed, unreformable, wealth and jobs destroying EUSSR, exposed in
a single back room fix.
EU, Rome seal preliminary rescue deal for Monte dei Paschi
The European Commission and Italy have reached a preliminary agreement on a state bailout for Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS.MI) that includes heavy cost cuts, losses for some investors and a cap on pay for the bank's top executives.The deal brings close to an end months of negotiations over the fate of the world's oldest bank and Italy's fourth biggest lender, the worst performer in European stress tests last year.
The Commission said it had agreed in principle on a restructuring plan for the bank so that it can be bailed out by the state under new European rules for dealing with bank crises.
"It would allow Italy to inject capital into MPS as a precaution, in line with EU rules, whilst limiting the burden on Italian taxpayers," Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
The bank would undergo deep restructuring to ensure its viability, including by cleaning its balance sheet of non-performing loans, she said.
Burdened by a bad loan pile and a mismanagement scandal, Monte dei Paschi has been for years at the forefront of Italy's slow-brewing banking crisis.
It was forced to request state aid in December to help cover a
capital shortfall of 8.8 billion euros ($9.9 billion) after it failed to raise
money on the market.
The accord with the European Commission exploits an exception in current
EU rules allowing member states to bolster the capital buffers of a bank
provided it is solvent and that shareholders and junior bondholders shoulder
some of the losses.
The government could end up injecting some 6.6 billion euros into the
bank, taking a stake of around 70 percent.
The agreement with Brussels is conditional on the European Central Bank
confirming the lender meets capital requirements and on the sale of some 26
billion euros in soured debts to private investors.
Monte dei Paschi said on Monday it was in exclusive talks until June 28
with a domestic fund and a group of investors to shift the debts off its
balance sheet and sell them repackaged as securities.
More
You can't depend on your eyes
when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
It was Putin what done it, the hacking that is,
until it wasn’t.
Russia
will not soon become, if it ever becomes, a second copy of the United States or
England - where liberal values have deep historic roots.
Vladimir
Putin.
Blame game for cyber attacks grows murkier as spying, crime tools mix
Veteran espionage researcher Jon DiMaggio was hot on the trail three
months ago of what on the face of it looked like a menacing new industrial
espionage attack by Russian cyber spies.
All the hallmarks were there: targeted phishing emails common to
government espionage, an advanced Trojan horse for stealing data from inside
organizations, covert communication channels for grabbing documents and clues
in the programming code indicating its authors were Russian speakers.
It took weeks before the lead cyber spying investigator at Symantec, a top
U.S. computer security firm, figured out instead he was tracking a lone-wolf
cyber criminal.
DiMaggio won't identify the name of the culprit, whom he has nicknamed
Igor, saying the case is a run-of-the-mill example of increasing difficulties
in separating national spy agency activity from cyber crime. The hacker comes
from Transdniestria, a disputed, Russian-speaking region of Moldova, he said.
"The malware in question, Trojan.Bachosens, was so advanced that
Symantec analysts initially thought they were looking at the work of
nation-state actors," DiMaggio told Reuters in a phone interview on
Wednesday. "Further investigation revealed a 2017 equivalent of the
hobbyist hackers of the 1990s."
Reuters could not contact the alleged hacker.
The example highlights the dangers of jumping to conclusions in the
murky world of cyber attack and defense, as tools once only available to
government intelligence services find their way into the computer criminal
underground.
Security experts refer to this as "the attribution problem",
using technical evidence to assign blame for cyber attacks in order to take
appropriate legal and political responses.
These questions echo through the debate over whether Russia used cyber
attacks to influence last year's U.S. presidential elections and whether Moscow
may be attempting to disrupt national elections taking place in coming months
across Europe.
The topic is a big talking point for military officials and private
security researchers at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict in
Tallin this week. It has been held each year since Estonia was swamped in 2007
by cyber attacks that took down government, financial and media websites amid a
dispute with Russia. Attribution for those attacks remains disputed.
"Attribution is almost never a clean, smoking-gun," said Paul Vixie, creator of the first commercial anti-spam service, whose latest firm, Farsight Security, helps firms track down cyber attackers to identify and block them.
Raising the stakes, a mystery group calling itself ShadowBrokers has taken credit for leaking cyber-spying tools that are now being turned to criminal use, including ones used in the recent WannaCry global ransomware attack, ratcheting up cyber security threats to a whole new level.
In recent weeks, ShadowBrokers has threatened to sell more such tools, believed to have been stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency, to enable hacking into the world's most used computers, software and phones. (reut.rs/2rmTZmm)
"The bar for what's considered advanced is lowered as time goes by," said Sean Sullivan, a security researcher with Finnish cyber firm F-Secure.
More
Nobody
should pin their hopes on a miracle.
Vladimir
Putin.
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC
energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? DC? A quantum
computer next?
Light-matter interaction detected in single layer of atoms
Discovery could lead to advances in 2-D materials, controlling light
Date:
May 30, 2017
Source:
University of Central Florida
Summary:
Researchers have pioneered a way to detect the interaction of light and matter
on a single layer of atoms. It's the first demonstration of an elastic
scattering, near-field experiment performed on a single layer of atoms.
University of Central Florida researchers have developed a new and
better way of detecting interactions between light and matter at the atomic
level, a discovery that could lead to advances in the emerging field of
two-dimensional materials and new ways of controlling light.
Scientists typically use spectrometry tools to study the way light
interacts with a gas, liquid or solid. That method is described as
"inelastic," meaning the light's energy is altered by its contact
with matter.
A team led by Professor Aristide Dogariu of UCF's CREOL, The College of
Optics & Photonics, has pioneered a way to detecting such interaction on a
single layer of atoms -- an exceedingly hard task because of the atom's minute
size -- using a method that's "elastic." That means the light's
energy remains unchanged.
"Our experiment establishes that, even at atomic levels, a
statistical optics-based measurement has practical capabilities unrivaled by
conventional approaches," Dogariu said.
As reported this month in Optica, the academic journal of The
Optical Society, it's the first demonstration of an elastic scattering,
near-field experiment performed on a single layer of atoms.
The researchers demonstrate this novel and fundamental phenomenon using
graphene, a two-dimensional, crystalline material. Their technique involved
random illumination of the atomic monolayer from all possible directions and
then analyzing how the statistical properties of the input light are influenced
by miniscule defects in the atomic layer.
The method provided scientists not only with a simple and robust way to
assess structural properties of 2D materials but also with new means for
controlling the complex properties of optical radiation at subwavelength
scales.
The team's finding that its method is superior to conventional ones is
of broad interest to the physics community. Beyond that, it could lead to other
advances.
More
Another weekend, and the last weekend before John Bull
votes. Another weekend for Donald Trump tweets too. Another chance for
Chancellor Merkel to show up in a beer tent chastising the United States.
Another chance for yet more chaos in Spain, Italy, and France. What’s not to
like about our new 21st century, dumbed down, Great Nixonian Error
of fiat money world.
As fewer and fewer people remember real money, the great
finely tuned machine of capitalism, gets ever more distorted by central
bankster cronyism. What more could possibly go wrong? Lots, as unfortunately we seem doomed to discover. Have a great
weekend everyone.
"If
facts do not conform to theory, they must be disposed of."
N.R.F.
Maier, Maier's Law.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: 21,009 +157 Up. NASDAQ: 6,199 +219 Up. SP500: 2,412 +161 Up.
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