Life takes us in many strange directions and wonderful discoveries. It never turns out the way we thought it would.
Friday, September 30, 2022
Thousands Of Victims Of Hurricane Ike Have Lost All Due To Florida Flood Insurance Laws
I spent yesterday evening watching reports from Florida where Hurricane Ian has hit. Thus far, the death toll has been relatively low-12 reported deaths. However, videos of the destruction lead one to believe that the areas had been attacked by the Russian army with massive artillery barrages.
Not readily apparent is an
aspect of the law in Florida concerning flood insurance. If your house or
apartment has a roof over 10 years of age, you cannot get flood insurance. I
spent hours watching many people in the area of destruction being interviewed.
Most had lost everything, and their normal homeowner's insurance will not pay
for the losses. They could not get flood insurance. Many are old and have lost
all. Imagine yourself in a situation like that.
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Putin Is A Bully And A Thug
We have seen our retirement funds and other investments drop in value. Even billionaires have seen big market losses. The conventional wisdom is that fear of inflation is depressing financial markets worldwide.
I have a contrarian view. I call
it "The Fear of Vladimir Putin stock market." The Ukraine war has
"turned the world on its ear." Energy markets have been disrupted.
Food markets have been disrupted. Commodity markets have been disrupted. The
New York Times came out with an Op-Ed yesterday pointing out all the awful
things that Vladimir Putin can still do as he becomes a cornered wild animal.
This man is simply a bully and a
thug. If people stand up to him, they will stop him. This "superman"
has failed miserably in Ukraine with 80,000 men and women killed
including a massive number of senior officers in 7 months. All his armed forces
have failed. His Air Force cannot carry out serious combat operations because
they do not have proper communications systems to keep their planes from being
shot down by "friendly fire." His Navy is in hiding and will not come
out and fight. We see corruption ad incompetence on a grand scale. There are
all sorts of reports on the deterioration of his feared nuclear arsenal. How
well will it work? I think not well.
Let us go back to the
Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and 1983. Mid-level Soviet officers (say Lt.
Colonel) had their hands right on the keys to fire nuclear warheads. They both
realized the enormity of such a move. They refused to fire. If history is any
guide, the officers under Putin will not carry out the orders to fire nuclear
weapons if Putin issues such orders.
If Putin does fire nuclear
warheads, he will be hit by two US cyber-attacks lasting only nanoseconds. One
will take his internet offline permanently. The other will take down his
electricity grid for many months. (Imagine being with no electric power for 4-5
months!) Russia will break apart, as the old Soviet Union did.
The Iran Regime May Fall Over Scarf Protests
Take It Off
IRAN
Big protests over little scarves are threatening to destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In mid-September, Iran’s morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, 22, for allowing a few strands of hair to escape her scarf, violating laws Iranian officials say are necessary under their orthodox Islamic views. Hours later, after she was put in a re-education center, she was admitted to the hospital “without any vital signs and brain-dead,” reported Time magazine.
Within hours of the public seeing images of Amini, dying in a hospital bed due to head trauma, protests were erupting across the country like wildfire. Led by women, the protesters carried pictures of Amini, burned their headscarves and shouted “woman, life, freedom.” They burned images of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian police clashed with the demonstrators, arresting at least 1,200 people, CNN wrote. At least 76 have died, the BBC reported.
Protests have swept Iran in recent years. But they have reflected discontent over economic issues and concerns about election rigging. These new protests are more serious because Iranians marching in the streets are challenging the theocratic social rules that govern Iranian society. That’s why they might leave a permanent mark on Iranian society, Foreign Policy magazine noted.
Iranian leaders have blamed American-based provocateurs for seeking to destabilize the country. “Washington is always trying to weaken Iran’s stability and security although it has been unsuccessful,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry told Reuters.
They may have a point. According to the New Yorker magazine, a 46-year-old Iranian dissident journalist and mother, who works from an FBI safe house in New York City, has orchestrated a social media campaign that has helped spur and coordinate the protests.
Iran also targeted their Kurdish community – Amini was Kurdish – by conducting strikes across the border on the headquarters of three Iranian Kurdish opposition parties, killing 13 and wounding 58, including children, the Washington Post reported.
Analysts say the blame-game by Iranian officials is pure deflection, calling it an uprising “by the Iranians, inside Iran, against the Iranian regime.”
Hardline President Ebrahim Raisi helped trigger the protests with his recent crackdown on moral crimes like women failing to wear their headscarves properly, or at all, the New York Times reported. Under the previous president, moderate Hassan Rouhani, the police didn’t zealously enforce such laws.
But now, millions of women are harassed for “improper hijab,” according to human rights groups. Meanwhile, “numerous” women are serving more than a decade in prison for failing to wear a headscarf, reported Amnesty International.
Raisi has even used facial recognition technology to catch women flouting the law, the Washington Post added. Under his rule, officials beat a girl who was identified in a video as not wearing a scarf, then compelled her to apologize on public television.
Observers don’t think the republic will fall due to the protests. But if it does, they fear the chaos that would result, citing how civil war often followed when authoritarian governments in the Middle East fell during the Arab Spring, the Intercept wrote. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps might impose military law rather than allow a democratically elected leadership to replace the country’s current leaders.
Who would have thought a scarf would cause so many problems?
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Snowden Granted Russian Citizenship
Welcome to the Fold
RUSSIA
Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden this week, nearly 10 years after the American whistleblower publicly disclosed classified information on US intelligence and mass surveillance programs, CNN reported.
The former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor has been living in exile in Russia since 2013, after initially traveling to Hong Kong following his public disclosure of top-secret information.
US authorities have accused Snowden of espionage and the theft of government property for leaking information about the NSA’s surveillance program. He faces up to 30 years in prison in the US should he return, the BBC noted.
Snowden and his wife, Lindsay Mills, applied for Russian citizenship in November 2020. His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told Russian media that the couple already has a child who was born in Russia and received Russian citizenship at birth.
The decision to grant Snowden citizenship comes a week after Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of its citizens to fight in the war in Ukraine.
The president’s announcement sparked strong public opposition in Russia, prompting many men of fighting age to flee the country.
Kucherena noted that Snowden will not be subject to the “partial mobilization” because he did not serve in the Russian army. That said, many men who have never served, are too old or have physical ailments have received notices to appear at recruitment offices.
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Monday, September 26, 2022
The Amazing Life Story Of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken
Anthony Blinken is the Secretary of State of the United States. He is the chief diplomat of the US. He runs the huge US State Department that oversees all US diplomatic missions around the world. If you get a US passport, he makes it possible.
He fits the profile of a senior cabinet officer in the US and
other countries in the world. It is a man or woman from an upper-middle-class
family or wealthy family. They attended some impressive academic institutions.
They had a distinguished career in law, business, or politics before rising to
cabinet officers.
Thanks to the television news program 60 minutes, I made some amazing
discoveries about Mr. Blinken. He is Jewish. His grandparents were
Hungarian Jews. His stepfather was a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor.
The Blinken family has close connections to Ukraine.
For those of you curious, here is his biography:
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Saturday, September 24, 2022
The Economist Magazine Cover For 9-24-2022
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Friday, September 23, 2022
Thursday, September 22, 2022
Pakistan: The Humanitarian Disaster Much Of The World Is Ignoring
Treading Water
PAKISTAN
Record floods have turned lowland farms in Pakistan into lakes, highlighting the fragility of an unstable developing nation in the era of climate change. “We are living on an island now,” farmer Muhammad Jaffar said in an interview with the New York Times. Jaffar’s cotton fields were now under “putrid water,” ruining his crop and raising questions about how he would feed his family in the months to come.
A third of Pakistan is underwater. The deluge has kicked off a gargantuan humanitarian crisis affecting 33 million people, reported Al Jazeera. Around 1,500 have died, half of them children, and some of these are because of a lack of access to clean water or food. More deaths are expected. The South Asian country’s public health system was already under strain. Now waterborne diseases are expected to flourish. Cases of dengue have soared as pools of stagnant water have proliferated, for example, added the BBC. Food shortages are also likely. Meanwhile, poisonous snakes flourish, Newsweek noted.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the deluge a “monsoon on steroids,” saying he’d never seen climate-related destruction on such a scale. The floods started in June amid a heatwave that caused glaciers in the mountainous country to melt. Heavy monsoon rains added more water. Now scientists are warning that the waters might not recede for as long as six months, CNN reported.
Pakistan could present the world with the kind of life-changing crisis that climate change experts have been issuing warnings about for years. Those experts have said that greenhouse gas emissions will make rainfall heavier in South Asia. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir saw injustice in the situation. Pakistan generates less than one percent of global carbon emissions but now is paying the price for all mankind’s effect on the environment, he argued in a column for the Washington Post.
In July and August, the country received almost 190 percent more rain than the 30-year average, Reuters noted. In some areas, the increase in precipitation was almost 470 percent.
But Mir also admitted that Pakistanis were disappointed with their corrupt and incompetent government’s mismanagement of the disaster. In 2010, flooding in Kalam washed away hotels on the popular Swat River. Developers were allowed to build in the exact same place after bribing officials. The new hotels recently collapsed. Economic losses associated with the floods are now forecast at $30 billion.
Omer Aijazi, a visiting researcher at the University of Victoria, explained in the Conversation how Pakistan’s poorest, most unstable and most politically oppressed areas have been hit hardest. “Uneven development and inequality” have also been a common characteristic of districts that have suffered the most.
If they can’t reclaim a third of their land, the richest Pakistanis are going to become much more familiar with people from those districts as they find new places to live.
Still, some villagers caught in the deluge are hanging on, refusing to leave. They say the little they have left is better than the nothing that awaits them.
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
Monday, September 19, 2022
Fareed Zakarias Gives An Excellent Report On Ukraine's Current Situation And Prospects For Victory
Fareed Zakarias is one of the finest television journalists in the world. Some years ago, Elena and I were honored to be invited to a speech that he gave in Oakland. He was impressive, yet warm and down to earth.
Fareed just came back from a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine. He gave a short report on CNN yesterday. He was most positive about the Ukraine war. He believes that the Ukraine people are going to win. Here is a 5-minute video that I urge you to watch:
There is great fear that with things going bad for Russia, Putin will resort to using chemical weapons as was the case in Syria, or tactical nuclear weapons. There are ominous reports of Russian tactical nuclear warheads being stationed in Crimea.
4 months ago, I was honored to sit down and have lunch with a professor at Tulane University who has been a personal friend of Putin for over 20 years. He describes Putin as sane and rational. He did not see him using nuclear weapons as a "first strike."
Let us assume, that Putin loses his rationality and "hits the red button" to launch nuclear warheads in Ukraine or a chemical weapons attack. I seriously doubt that the officers actually in charge of the weapons would carry out the order. If this happened, Putin would be removed from power immediately.
Let us go one step further and assume that these officers carry out Putin's orders. Weapons of mass destruction are employed in Ukraine with devastating casualties.
Russia would become a pariah in the world community. China would be enraged. Russia would be alone and isolated. Their economy would collapse. We might see the country break up as the old Soviet Union did.
Would the US respond with nuclear weapons? I do not have access to the classified documents needed to answer this question with certainty. I'm a pretty good researcher like the late author Tom Clancy. We hear all these horror stories about cyber attacks carried out around the world. We hear nothing about US cyber-attacks and capabilities. The US has awesome capabilities in the cyber-attack area. Russia's internet and electric power grid would be taken down and left inoperable for months. Imagine any society without electric power and the internet indefinitely. Russian society would start to disintegrate.
One would say that if such a cyber-attack took place, Russian nuclear weapons would be launched immediately toward the US. I think not. All Russian command and control systems would be inoperable. Land-based ICBMs and aircraft attacks would not take place. Russia's submarine-launched ICBMs are far inferior to US and British submarine-launched ICBM systems. I feel that this system would be inoperable also. Putin and his colleagues know this. As incompetent as their army, navy, and air force are, their intelligence services like the GRU are very competent.