With the US government engaged in out-of-control spending, we are looking at tax increases in the coming years. And even if Congress does not pass official tax hikes, we will see the government seizing wealth via inflation.
Category: Science
Tropical Storm Hone Public Advisory
…HONE WEAKENS SLIGHTLY HEADING TOWARD THE DATE LINE…
As of 11:00 PM HST Wed Aug 28
the center of Hone was located near 20.8, -171.2
with movement W at 9 mph.
The minimum central pressure was 1004 mb
with maximum sustained winds of about 45 mph.
Tropical Storm Hone Forecast Advisory
Issued at 0900 UTC THU AUG 29 2024
Tropical Storm Gilma Public Advisory
…GILMA BARELY A TROPICAL STORM … …EXPECTED TO DISSIPATE NEAR KAUAI OVER THE WEEKEND…
As of 11:00 PM HST Wed Aug 28
the center of Gilma was located near 19.5, -149.5
with movement W at 14 mph.
The minimum central pressure was 1007 mb
with maximum sustained winds of about 40 mph.
Remnants of Hector Forecast Discussion
Issued at 200 AM PDT Thu Aug 29 2024
687 WTPZ43 KNHC 290835 TCDEP3 Remnants Of Hector Discussion Number 15 NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL EP082024 200 AM PDT Thu Aug 29 2024 An overnight scatterometer pass showed that the low-level center of Hector has opened up into a trough. There remains a limited area of shallow convection displaced over 250 n mi from the remnants of the center. The initial intensity has been reduced to 30 kt based on the ASCAT data. The remnants of Hector should continue to move generally westward for the next couple of days. This is the final NHC advisory for Hector. For additional information on this system, please see High Seas Forecasts issued by the National Weather Service, under AWIPS header NFDHSFEPI, WMO header FZPN02 KWBC, and on the web at ocean.weather.gov/shtml/NFDHSFEPI.php. FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS INIT 29/0900Z 16.9N 135.4W 30 KT 35 MPH 12H 29/1800Z...DISSIPATED $$ Forecaster Bucci
Remnants of Hector Wind Speed Probabilities
Issued at 0900 UTC THU AUG 29 2024
Remnants of Hector Public Advisory
…HECTOR DISSIPATES… …THIS IS THE LAST NHC ADVISORY…
As of 2:00 AM PDT Thu Aug 29
the center of Hector was located near 16.9, -135.4
with movement W at 13 mph.
The minimum central pressure was 1008 mb
with maximum sustained winds of about 35 mph.
Remnants of Hector Forecast Advisory
Issued at 0900 UTC THU AUG 29 2024
The Western Way Of War – Owning The Narrative Trumps Reality
The Western Way Of War – Owning The Narrative Trumps Reality
Authored by Alastair Crooke,
War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself.
The West has come to view ‘owning’ the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual ‘victory’ thus trumps ‘real’ reality.
So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media.
This objective enjoys a higher priority than, say, ensuring a manufacturing capacity sufficient to sustain military objectives. Crafting an imagined ‘reality’ has taken precedence over shaping the ground reality.
The point here is that this approach – being a function of whole of society alignment (both at home and abroad) – creates entrapments into false realities, false expectations, from which an exit (when such becomes necessary), turns near impossible, precisely because imposed alignment has ossified public sentiment. The possibility for a State to change course as events unfold becomes curtailed or lost, and the accurate reading of facts on the ground veers toward the politically correct and away from reality.
The cumulative effect of ‘a winning virtual narrative’ holds the risk nonetheless, of sliding incrementally toward inadvertent ‘real war’.
Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.
Had the Ukrainian forces succeeded in capturing the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, they then would have had a significant bargaining chip, and might well have syphoned away Russian forces from the steadily collapsing Ukrainian ‘Line’ in Donbas.
And to top it off, (in infowar terms), the western media was prepped and aligned to show President Putin as “frozen” by the surprise incursion, and “wobbling” with anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.
Bill Burns, head of CIA, opined that “Russia would offer no concessions on Ukraine, until Putin’s over-confidence was challenged, and Ukraine could show strength”. Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk incursion – in itself – would not bring Russia to the negotiating table; It would be necessary to build on the Kursk operation with other daring operations (to shake Moscow’s sang froid).
Of course, the overall aim was to show Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in line with the narrative that, at any moment Russia, could crack apart and scatter to the wind, in fragments. Leaving the West as winner, of course.
In fact, the Kursk incursion was a huge NATO gamble: It involved mortgaging Ukraine’s military reserves and armour, as chips on the roulette table, as a bet that an ephemeral success in Kursk would upend the strategic balance. The bet was lost, and the chips forfeit.
Plainly put, this Kursk affair exemplifies the West’s problem with ‘winning narratives’: Their inherent flaw is that they are grounded in emotivism and eschew argumentation. Inevitably, they are simplistic. They are simply intended to fuel a ‘whole of society’ common alignment. Which is to say that across MSM; business, federal agencies, NGOs and the security sector, all should adhere to opposing all ‘extremisms’ threatening ‘our democracy’.
This aim, of itself, dictates that the narrative be undemanding and relatively uncontentious: ‘Our Democracy, Our Values and Our Consensus’. The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraces ‘Joy’ (repeated endlessly), ‘moving Forward’ and ‘opposing weirdness’ as key statements. They are banal, however, these memes are given their energy and momentum, not by content so much, as by the deliberate Hollywood setting lending them razzamatazz and glamour.
It is not hard to see how this one-dimensional zeitgeist may have contributed to the U.S. and its allies’ misreading the impact of today’s Kursk ‘daring adventure’ on ordinary Russians.
‘Kursk’ has history. In 1943, Germany invaded Russia in Kursk to divert from its own losses, with Germany ultimately defeated at the Battle of Kursk. The return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must have left many gaping; the current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army.
Over the centuries, Russia has been variously attacked on its vulnerable flank from the West. And more recently by Napoleon and Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Russians are acutely sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns et al think this through? Did they imagine that NATO invading Russia itself would make Putin feel ‘challenged’, and that with one further shove, he would fold, and agree to a ‘frozen’ outcome in Ukraine – with the latter entering NATO? Maybe they did.
Ultimately the message that western services sent was that the West (NATO) is coming for Russia. This is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. Reading the runes of Bill Burns message says prepare for war with NATO.
Just to be clear, this genre of ‘winning narrative’ surrounding Kursk is neither deceit nor feint. The Minsk Accords were examples of deceit, but they were deceits grounded in rational strategy (i.e. they were historically normal). The Minsk deceits were intended to buy the West time to further Ukraine’s militarisation – before attacking the Donbas. The deceit worked, but only at the price of a rupture of trust between Russia and the West. The Minsk deceits however, also accelerated an end to the 200-year era of the westification of Russia.
Kursk rather, is a different ‘fish’. It is grounded in the notions of western exceptionalism. The West perceives itself as tacking to ‘the right side of History’. ‘Winning narratives’ essentially assert – in secular format – the inevitability of the western eschatological Mission for global redemption and convergence. In this new narrative context, facts-on-the-ground become mere irritants, and not realities that must be taken into account.
This their Achilles’ Heel.
The DNC convention in Chicago however, underscored a further concern:
Just as the hegemonic West arose out of the Cold War era shaped and invigorated through dialectic opposition to communism (in the western mythology), so we see today, a (claimed) totalising ‘extremism’ (whether of MAGA mode; or of the external variety: Iran, Russia, etc.) – posed in Chicago in a similar Hegelian dialectic opposition to the former capitalism versus communism; but in today’s case, it is “extremism” in conflict with “Our Democracy”.
The DNC Chicago narrative-thesis is itself a tautology of identity differentiation posing as ‘togetherness’ under a diversity banner and in conflict with ‘whiteness’ and ‘extremism’. ‘Extremism’ effectively plainly is being set up as the successor to the former Cold War antithesis – communism.
The Chicago ‘back-room’ may be imagining that a confrontation with extremism – writ widely – will again, as it did in the post-Cold War era, yield an American rejuvenation. Which is to say that a conflict with Iran, Russia, and China (in a different way) may come onto the agenda. The telltale signs are there (plus the West’s need for a re-set of its economy, which war regularly provides).
The Kursk ploy no doubt seemed clever and audacious to London and Washington. Yet with what result? It achieved neither objective of taking Kursk NPP, nor of syphoning Russian troops from the Contact Line. The Ukrainian presence in the Kursk Oblast will be eliminated.
What it did do, however, is put an end to all prospects of an eventual negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Distrust of the U.S. in Russia is now absolute. It has made Moscow more determined to prosecute the special operation to conclusion. German equipment visible in Kursk has raised old ghosts, and consolidated awareness of the hostile western intentions toward Russia.
‘Never again’ is the unspoken riposte.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/28/2024 – 23:25
Tropical Storm Hone Forecast Discussion
Issued at 500 PM HST Wed Aug 28 2024
000 WTPA41 PHFO 290237 TCDCP1 Tropical Storm Hone Discussion Number 27 NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI CP012024 500 PM HST Wed Aug 28 2024 This morning's burst of deep convection near the center of Hone has faded, and the low-level circulation center has become fully exposed again. Strong vertical shear continues to keep the tropical cyclone asymmetric with deep convection confined to the northeastern quadrant. The latest subjective Dvorak intensity estimates from PHFO, JTWC, and SAB again came in at 30 to 55 kt. The objective estimates were 28 to 40 kt. A nice ASCAT pass from late this morning showed several 45 kt wind barbs. The initial intensity for this advisory will be kept at 45 kt, and the 34 kt radii were also expanded slightly based on the scatterometer data. Hone will remain over warm SSTs through the forecast period. Vertical shear will remain strong over the next 2 to 3 days. The main question will be whether or not the strong shear will result in post-tropical cyclone status within that time frame. GFS simulated IR data seems to favor the post-tropical scenario. The high-res hurricane models favor maintenance as a tropical cyclone. The ECMWF has pulsing but generally decreasing deep convection that could result in post-tropical cyclone status between 24 and 72 hours. For this advisory, Hone is now forecast to remain as a tropical cyclone through the forecast period in deference to the high-res models and considering that its current deep convection is stronger than the GFS/post-tropical solution valid for the current time. In terms of intensity, the forecast generally follows the consensus of the objective aids and shows slight initial weakening, then keeps Hone as a 40 kt system until 96 hours. This forecast of relatively steady intensity reflects the possibility that despite the strong shear, deep convection will continue to pulse enough to maintain its strength. At the end of the forecast period, Hone is forecast to intensify, with several models showing an increase to typhoon strength beyond 120 hours west of the International Date Line. For this advisory, Hone's initial movement is 280/8 kt. The tropical cyclone is being steered by a weak low- to mid-level ridge to the north. This general motion is expected to continue over the next couple of days based on the tight clustering of the objective guidance. As Hone approaches the International Date Line, the tropical cyclone is forecast to interact with a developing low pressure system aloft, which will result in a turn toward the northwest. The various global models handle this interaction differently, resulting in greater spread in the objective guidance and greater uncertainty beyond 72 hours. Toward the end of the forecast period, there is a potential risk of impacts to Midway, Kure, and Pearl and Hermes Atolls. FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS INIT 29/0300Z 20.8N 170.2W 45 KT 50 MPH 12H 29/1200Z 21.0N 171.4W 40 KT 45 MPH 24H 30/0000Z 21.4N 173.0W 40 KT 45 MPH 36H 30/1200Z 21.8N 174.4W 40 KT 45 MPH 48H 31/0000Z 22.3N 175.5W 40 KT 45 MPH 60H 31/1200Z 23.1N 176.3W 40 KT 45 MPH 72H 01/0000Z 24.3N 176.9W 40 KT 45 MPH 96H 02/0000Z 26.5N 179.5W 40 KT 45 MPH 120H 03/0000Z 27.5N 177.0E 45 KT 50 MPH $$ Forecaster Kodama