What ISIS wants

Where did ISIS or Islamic State come from? What do they want? Bad news of their murderous path to power frequently makes the headlines (scroll down to see the last two days' posts).

They don't keep what they want a secret. They filmed themselves executing Christians and entitled it, "A message signed with blood to the nation of the cross".

Why France?

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"Since January 2015, IS-inspired attackers have killed at least 235 people in France, by far the largest casualty rate of any Western country." Other European countries have suffered terror attacks but France seems to be a particular target. Why?

Large areas of Africa and the Middle East were French colonies, some of them held til just ~60 years ago, and some still have a French military presence. Families and descendants from those areas live in France today where they populate poor and alienated districts. Islamic State recruiting propaganda reaches these people and also French-speaking Muslims in Raqqa, Syria.  

Francois Hollande, president of France, said that their Western values also motivate attacks. "Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them."

Target France

France has been in a state of emergency since last November. Yesterday they endured yet another murder by ISIS followers, this time the knifing of an 84-year-old priest who was conducting mass in church.

This CNN author says it is part of Islamic State's international war on Christians, that they want a war between religions.

"Not only has the group driven out Christian populations from cities such as Mosul, but it has targeted them for death across the Middle East, including in Egypt where a local Islamic State affiliate has assassinated Coptic priests. In Nigeria, ISIS affiliate Boko Haram killed more than 4,000 Christians last year and attacked almost 200 churches, according to figures compiled by a Nigerian Christian organization."

The archbishop of Rouen, city near the site of the attack, said "I cry out to God with all men of goodwill."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Air cleaner

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Dutch artist Dan Roosegaard will be testing his air-cleaning-tower in Beijing in September. The towers create a pool of cleaner air as the they take out about 75% of the pollution.

The amount of energy used by the towers is another aspect of their usefulness. They run on just 1400 watts of power - no more than a tea kettle.

Btw, that ring in yesterday's post was actually a "cube that resembles a diamond," made by compressing the captured smog for half an hour.

Capture smog

Smog is a real problem in Beijing, China. How great would it be if they could trap that smog and turn it into something valuable like, say, diamonds.

Crazy as it sounds, a process to do this was invented by a Dutch artist. Here's a link to the video (which I would embed for you if I could figure out how).

Wifi hunting

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Sometimes it's not only food she hunts for, but also internet access.

It's not safe to bring stacks of currency to pay bills (it takes "stacks" because inflation is spiraling). Bulky cash would be unsafe anywhere, but especially in the nation with the third-highest murder rate in the world.

That factor gives farmers markets an advantage beyond the fresh produce because the farmers accept credit cards. After picking out her foods, she gets in line to pay - then it starts raining.

"This is a problem. The Internet system that links the debit-card scanner to the banking sector crashes. Years of under-investment have compromised the system’s reliability. A half-hour goes by. There are now 30 of us waiting to pay. Some start grumbling about: the checkout clerk (she’s lazy), the banks (they’re awful), and the country overall (this place is just one endless line). A couple of elderly men give up. They put down their grocery bags and walk off. A few minutes later, I join them."

It's not easy doing the daily basics in Venezuela these days.

Food hunting

Venezuela's inflation rate is 200+%, meaning it loses at least half its value every year. Prices are regulated by the government, and the black market functions almost freely. Here's an account of what these economic facts mean in day-to-day life.

Fabiola Zerpa, mother of two, doesn't so much shop for food as hunt for food. Sometimes she bags it because of her persistence.

She's allowed to shop Sunday (useless because no regulated goods are sold on weekends) & Thursday. On the way to work Thursday she drives past a store, but the line is two blocks long and she can't wait. She stops at a bakery but they only sell bread at 5 p.m.

Her husband is able to buy (at 8x the regulated price) 5 kilos of corn flour through the friend of a friend. They use some of it to barter for powdered milk.

A week later she goes to a grocery without lines, to find that there are no lines because there are few groceries. “The bread arrived early, señora,” says a middle-aged store clerk. “It’s all gone.”  (cont'd tomorrow)

Good pasta

Skeptical is how I tend to be regarding this research. Surprised and glad is how I'll be if it turns out to be true. Maybe new information will come out to confirm it. According to this study, pasta is good for you.

That's just the opposite of the conventional wisdom,  that pasta is "the ultimate enemy of a lean body." But it wouldn't be the first time we've seen this kind of thing. That fact which "everybody knows" (including doctors and the government) . . turns out to be wrong.

"The results were pretty unequivocal. In both the groups, pasta consumption was linked in both women and men of different ages with a lower BMI, smaller waist circumference, and lower waist-to-hip ratio. 

No cakewalk

Uber drivers have now completed over a billion rides in 76 countries since their start in 2011.

In the face of considerable opposition, Uber has managed to succeed as an alternative to the taxi industry. In London, where black cabs are in fight mode, about 30,000 people become new Uber users per week.

Hungary just became the second country to outright ban it. Uber is trying to get around some sort of legal challenge in Taiwan.

"Regulating them out of business is one way of proceeding, but it is not the right way, for a litany of reasons – not least the new and perhaps unusual income earning opportunities they offer for sections of society who would find it difficult to earn money in  more traditional ways."

Crossing

(If you're unfamiliar with this downward spiral, click on "Venezuela" label to the right.)

For a couple of weekends, the people of Venezuela have had a new way to cope with desperate shortages of food and essentials. They lined up to cross the national border into Colombia.

The 1000+ mile border was closed by the government about a year ago, but with things getting worse they opened the border for 2 weekends. Well over one hundred thousand Venezuelans crossed over Saturday and Sunday to find food and merchandise.

A 70-year-old retired school teacher bringing her 5-month-old granddaughter said, "It's sad to be doing this, but we also know over there we'll find something."

photo: mysanantonio.com

Guns vs. canes

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

After decades of big growth, China's economy is slowing down and showing some weaknesses.  "[M]ore people [are] now exiting the workforce than entering it."

Hundreds of millions of peasants and laborers have paid nothing into any pension system. But the government wants to start building such a program, and it will be a huge expense. So . . economic growth is slowing down because there are fewer in the workforce, while costs to the country are escalating to take care of a growing number of seniors.

Not long ago, experts predicted that China's economy and military power would soon overtake the size of America's. But now that prediction is being questioned. Will they make the choice to allow an exploding elderly population to live in poverty while they challenge America's military preeminence? Or will their military dreams take a back seat?

(from The Atlantic)

Guns or canes

As you know, demography is changing our world. Birth rate has been under replacement rate (2.1 births per woman average) in many places for years, but is still over replacement rate in others, mainly Africa and the Middle East (see Demography label).

With China's one child policy in place for decades, their population will eventually decline and their whole society will feel it. Just last year its armed forces were reduced in number by 300,000 men.

Today there's almost 5 workers for every retiree who's out of the work force. By 2040 it's projected that there will be only 1.6 workers per retiree. What will that be like? Over one-third of all Chinese people will be retired: one or more of every three people will be elderly.

This author says the government will have to set priorities, guns or canes.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Cutting back

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"[T]he German government estimates that it will spend over $1.1 trillion financially supporting wind power, even though building wind turbines hasn’t achieved the government’s goal of actually reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to slow global warming."

That's a humongous amount of money. Where did it come from? From Germany's taxpayers, who fund the government, which gives huge subsidies to wind and solar producers. According to theguardian.com (above), all this spending has not reduced carbon emissions.

As a scale to understand what they have invested, the average German pays 39 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity (in US dollars) while the average American pays 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity.

"Germany’s legislature voted Friday to sharply cut back on subsidies and other financial incentives supporting green energy due to the strain wind and solar power placed on the country’s electricity grid."

More coal

Germany's energy program was an aggressive switch from fossil and nuclear sources to solar and wind power in order to reduce  carbon emissions.

After the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear plant was hit by a tsunami in 2011, Germany decided to shut down all their own nuclear power plants by 2022. The plan was to replace nuclear (which supplied 29% of their power) with wind power, but that isn't working out too well despite huge taxpayer funding. Some windmills are actually going to be scrapped.

What is replacing the power from these reductions? Coal. Yes, they are going back to coal, the dirtiest source of power.

"While Germany continues to expand solar and wind power, the government’s decision to phase out nuclear energy means it must now rely heavily on the dirtiest form of coal, lignite, to generate electricity. The result is that after two decades of progress, the country’s CO2 emissions are rising."

photo: theguardian.com

(cont'd tomorrow)

Crises

One of America's too frequent crises erupted last week. And again I've chosen to ignore it in this blog. I always do ignore them, and here's why.

First, the presses and the internet just blaze with rhetoric, red hot passions along with cool analysis.  There are lots of voices, so I'm confident that you can find what you want to read about every crisis without my input.

Instead, I feel called to bring your attention to some important things that are not currently in crisis mode, good articles and books that you might miss.

What's the value in that? I'd like us to think things through before issues turn into crises.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is valued in science because there's always new data to be applied against a theory. Sometimes new data confirms a theory, sometimes new data makes a theory less certain. Authentic science is open to dissent.

But some scientists are less concerned with new insights than they are with protecting the old theory that evolution fully explains all of life.

The Royal Society of London has scheduled a meeting next November entitled, "New Trends in Evolutionary Biology." Discomfort with any questioning of evolutionary theory (like one organizer's call for big revision) may lead to cancellation of the meeting.

On the other hand, a recent poll shows that Americans, unlike those who want to shut down the meeting, are very comfortable with airing controversy and disagreement: 

94%  believe “it is important for policymakers and the public to hear from scientists with differing views.”

84% believe that “attempts to censor or punish scientists for holding dissenting views on issues such as evolution or climate change are not appropriate in a free society."

Selling oil

A U.S. ban on the export of oil was lifted last winter after decades of restriction. Some customers purchasing the oil in May included Japan, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands and Canada (which was never subject to the former ban).

When a supplier and a buyer are not coerced [def link],  both sides consider the transaction a benefit - or it doesn't happen. That means that each of these customers and each oil company are getting something they want at a price they can accept.

Benefits will also go to  . . us, the people of America. Estimated benefits are:

• "lower gasoline prices by an annual average of 8 cents a gallon"
• "811,000 new jobs in 2017"

Accident

There's been a fatal accident involving a Tesla Model S while operating in Auto pilot mode. It happened about a week ago and is going to be investigated by the National Highway Safety Administration "to determine whether the system worked according to expectations."

A tractor trailer drove across the road in front of the Tesla. Because the side of it was bright white, neither the driver nor the car's sensors noticed it against a bright sky and so the brakes were not applied. The car went underneath, and the impact occurred against the windshield.

Tesla warns drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and their attention on the road, but there may be a tendency for drivers to be too confident with this not-yet-mature system. 

From Tesla's blog: "This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles."

Confirmed

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These words from the Declaration of Independence were written by Thomas Jefferson, perhaps not a Christian but yet a believer in God as our Creator.

He felt that evidence in all of nature supported this belief, writing in a letter to John Adams, "[I]t is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of [the universe's] composition."

According to Dr. Stephen Meyer, this intuition has been confirmed by modern evidence of purposeful design in nature. 

1776 Pledge

When President Cleveland spoke at the 1926 celebration of Independence Day, he said "Our forefathers came to certain conclusions and decided upon certain courses of action which have been a great blessing to the world."

Those forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence and said that "government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed." They bet all they had on the rectitude [definition link] of their cause.

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

The American founders found the courage to defy the tyranny of the ruling elite . .  and the world turned a corner.

Islamic growth

(cont'd)

So Islam and Christianity are predicted to grow (in contrast to other religions) over the next few decades. Islam will grow faster. Why? That CNN article gives two reasons.

One easy answer is that Muslim women have more children. Birth rates in The West have been tumbling for years, but birth rates in the Middle East, Africa, and some parts of Asia are still well over replacement rate.

Second, conversion out of Islam may be dangerous, even illegal in some nations. In Christianity, there's no penalty to change your mind.

So that's what the article said. But there's another obvious factor chilling the growth of Christianity in some parts of the world: genocide of Christians in the name of Islamic extremism, as recognized by both the European Union and the United States government.