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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 23-Sep-2014
23-Sep-14 World View -- Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees

Web Log - September, 2014

23-Sep-14 World View -- Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees

Yazidis, Mosul Christians hold Obama responsible for ISIS

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Massive Hong Kong student demonstrations challenge Beijing
Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees
Yazidis, Mosul Christians hold Obama responsible for ISIS
Horse manure and climate change

Massive Hong Kong student demonstrations challenge Beijing

Student demonstrations at Chinese University of Hong Kong on Monday (AP)

Student demonstrations at Chinese University of Hong Kong on Monday (AP)

Thousands of college students in Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, joined by hundreds of faculty members, boycotted classes Monday to protest Beijing's reneging on the 1997 agreement under which Hong Kong as a British colony reverted to Chinese control. The deal was known as "one country, two systems," meaning that Beijing would pursue Communism and Socialism, while Hong Kong would retain its democracy, its capitalist system, and its way of life. Hong Kong was promised free elections, but Beijing is pre-determining the 2017 election by allowing only three Beijing-approved candidates to run for office.

Separately, Beijing has also been clamping down on the use of the Cantonese version of the Chinese language, the native dialect of 50 million Chinese people. In Guangdong province in southern China, Beijing authorities are forbidding Cantonese in any television shows, requiring the Mandarin (Putonghua) version favored by Beijing. Hong Kong also speaks Cantonese, and it's feared that Beijing will impose similar requirements there. Cantonese and Mandarin are written using the same characters, but are spoken differently.

A recent poll of Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong found that 20% of them would like to leave Hong Kong and emigrate to other countries. Huge waves of emigration previously occurred after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and again when Hong Kong sovereignty transferred from Britain to China in 1997.

Activists in Macau, a former Portuguese colony with similar administrative status to Hong Kong, are planning to hold their own pro-democracy referendum, and are watching the Hong Kong demonstrations closely.

Taiwan is also closely watching the demonstrations in Hong Kong, especially the members of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Taiwan universities are scheduling lectures and other forms of support for the pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Hong Kong and Taiwan were closely linked after World War II, when Nationalists fighting Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution used Hong Kong as a transit point to escape to Formosa (Taiwan). AP and AFP and Deutsche-Welle and AFP

Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees

Turkey has been home to over 1.3 million Syrian refugees since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, with 130,000 new refugees flooding in since Friday. The tsunami of refugees in the last few days has been from border towns and cities where militias from the Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS) are going house to house, killing people, abducting girls, and enslaving others. Turkish officials say that they are prepared for a flood of additional refugees in the next few days. The fear is that ISIS will send suicide bombers across the border, along with the refugees. Sabah (Ankara) and Zaman (Istanbul)

Yazidis, Mosul Christians hold Obama responsible for ISIS

According to MEMRI, many Arab writers blame president Barack Obama for the rise of the Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS). Here is one column MEMRI quotes:

"The terrified Yazidi woman on Mount Sinjar counted her family members. The tally broke her heart. Those who did not arrive with her never would. She fled quickly and convinced herself that they had too. They never arrived. Her two sons and her daughter. Left to the mercy of ISIS. And this 'merciful' organization beheads the infidels, crucifies them, or buries them alive. Left to the mercy of the caliph. He likes his state clean and pure and will not tolerate toxic weeds in his garden.
"Who will the terrified Yazidi woman turn to? She won't call on [Arab League Secretary-General] Nabil Al-'Arabi, because his company [the Arab League] is known to be bankrupt. She won't call on [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon, because he has nothing [to offer her] but his own tears. She won't call on the Iraqi army, since it has already fallen to ISIS and given it the best of its weapons as a gift. She won't call on the Peshmerga, since their weapons are too meager for this campaign. There is but one element [she can turn to]. She spread her arms and said: 'Where is America? Where is Obama?' ...
The Yazidi woman is entitled to treat Barack Obama as a criminal. He quickly fled with his soldiers, leaving Iraq in the hands of the spiteful lovers of anonymous corpses and assassinations. He pretended to forget that his own country invaded Iraq, and that one of its witless administrators ordered to dismantle the Iraqi army. He ignored his moral responsibility. He spared American blood, leaving us [to drown] in lakes of blood."

Memri

Horse manure and climate change

Yesterday, I wrote that there's a historical precedent for the climate change debate, that predicts we'll all be underwater in a few decades. That historical precedent was the horse manure debate of over a century ago, that predicted that we'd all be under horse manure within a few decades.

A couple of web site readers have requested further information. Here's a summary:

The world's first international urban planning conference was held in New York City in 1898. The major topic that dominated the conference was not housing, land use, economic development or infrastructure. It was horse manure.
Horse manure was causing all sorts of problems -- urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, traffic accidents, and widespread cruelty to horses.
A horse produces between 7 and 15 kilos of manure daily. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced nearly 1,200 metric tons of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. In addition, each horse produces nearly a liter of urine per day, which also ended up on the streets.
The 1898 conference ended in three days instead of the scheduled ten days, because delegates could not agree on any solution. (This would be similar to the big climate change conference in 2009 in Copenhagen.)
The crisis was resolved quickly with new technology: the automobile. By 1912 there were more cars than horses on the road in New York City. By 1920, the problem had all but disappeared.

During my lifetime, I've seen any number of hysterical environment disaster predictions. My favorite was the prediction in 1970 by far left-wing Ramparts Magazine that predicted that the oceans were becoming so polluted that by 1980 the world's oceans would be covered by a layer of algae. It didn't happen.

Like the horse manure crisis, the climate change crisis will be solved by new technologies that today are barely foreseen. These will include things like intelligent computers that will perform cleanup tasks that humans can't perform and microbiology technologies that will convert excess carbon dioxide back to harmless materials. Thousands of research labs around the world are motivated to identify such technologies, because any company finding one will patent it and make billions of dollars. No further motivation is needed. From Horse Power to Horsepower and The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 and Great Moments in Failed Predictions

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 23-Sep-14 World View -- Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (23-Sep-2014) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 23-Sep-2014 23-Sep-14 World View -- Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees

Massive Hong Kong student demonstrations challenge Beijing

Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees

Yazidis, Mosul Christians hold Obama responsible for ISIS

Horse manure and climate change

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 23-Sep-2014
23-Sep-14 World View -- Turkey braces for expected flood of hundreds of thousands more refugees