In his best-selling book The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain described his 1867 visit to Ottoman Palestine as it was known then as a land of “unpeopled deserts” and “mounds of barrenness,” of “forlorn” and “untenanted” cities (chapter 48).

The Palestine of Mohammedans (as he called Moslems) is a “waste of a limitless desolation,” he concluded, “desolate and unlovely” (chapter 56).

The same is true today of the Palestinian Museum which opened in Ramallah on May 18 with much fanfare and one slight problem. While admission is free, there’s nothing inside for any of the visitors to see except the bare walls.

The Palestinian Museum had been in the works since 1998, but has no exhibits. The museum cost $24 million. All it has to show for it are a few low sloping sandy buildings indistinguishable from the dirt and a “garden” of scraggly bushes and shrubs.  It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for Palestine. 

Palestine is an empty building with nothing in it. It’s a political Potemkin village. There’s a flag, an anthem, a museum and all the trappings of a country. But if you look closer, there’s nothing inside.

Over the course of the last two and half years, the Chinese government has shown signs of increasing nervousness and wariness of the growth of Christianity.

In its latest grasp for control, the Communist government has taken Christian churches in Zhejiang province to task, by removing the crosses that adorn some 1,700 churches. Citing breach of building codes, the government sent in police SWAT teams to remove the crucifixes from spires.  Zhejiang is an important province of 55 million, adjacent to Shanghai, China’s and the world’s most populous city of 25 million.

Early last month, Xi Jinping made a speech on religious policy stating, “We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringement by extremists.”

This stance is in line with the CCP’s long-held objective of controlling belief systems. A Pew Research Center report estimates that there are close to 68 million Christians in China — an astonishing number considering the growth of Christianity has largely been by way of faith conversion – while the BBC estimates there are as many as 100 million.

And it’s worth noting that Christianity is hardly a recent “overseas infiltration.” Chinese have been adopting the Christian faith since 635 AD during the Tang Dynasty.

Nobody rings a bell at the top of the credit supercycle, to misuse an old adage. Except that this time somebody very powerful in China has done exactly that. 

China watchers are still struggling to identify the author of an electrifying article in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, People's Daily, that declares war on debt and the "fantasy" of perpetual stimulus. 

Written in a imperial tone, it commands China to break its addiction to credit and take its punishment before matters spiral out of control. If that means bankruptcies must run their course, so be it. 

China's debt is approaching $30 trillion, 440% of China’s GDP of $6.8 trillion.  Popping a debt bubble that gigantic could be catastrophic for the entire world’s global - and over-globalized - financial system. 

This summer brings the 50th anniversary of the full deciphering of the genetic code — the four-billion-year-old cipher by which DNA’s information is translated and expressed.   The genetic code was the greatest of all the 20th-century’s scientific discoveries.

Fifty years on, the discovery of the genetic code has produced a cornucopia of good and very little harm. It has convicted the guilty and exonerated the innocent in court on a huge scale through DNA fingerprinting. It has enabled people to avoid passing on terrible diseases.

It has led to the development of new drugs, new therapies and new diagnoses. It has given partial sight back to a blind man through gene therapy. It has increased the yield of crops while reducing the use of chemical pesticides.

Yet still we are bombarded with scares about Frankenstein foods, biological warfare, designer babies, genetic discrimination and the return of eugenics. We have a virtual ban on GM crops and put huge obstacles in the way of GM vaccines.

The exhaustive and cautious new report from the American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.

Global fund managers have almost no faith in the latest stock market rallies around the world and have begun to fear the worst from Brexit, putting aside near record sums of money in cash as they brace for a ‘summer of shocks.’

Investors have already lost confidence in China’s economic rebound this year and are shunning British equities like the plague, fearing a financial crunch if Britain votes to leave the EU.

Bank of America’s monthly survey of funds shows that 27% now think Brexit is the biggest ‘tail-risk’ for the global economy, overtaking neuralgic concerns about a devaluation by China or a wave of defaults by Chinese companies.

Longstanding fears that central banks are running out of policy ammunition or risk ‘quantitative failure’ have slipped to third place. The new worry is ‘stagflation’ in the US, a toxic mix of slowing growth and rising inflation at the same time.

What is puzzling is that this mood of deep alarm conflicts with clear evidence of accelerating monetary growth worldwide, usually a harbinger of better times ahead.