- Governments Come Clean In New 'Honest Ad' About Assange's Arrest
The British, Australian, Ecuadorian and US Governments have made an ad about Julian Assange’s arrest and it’s surprisingly honest and informative!
- Notre Dame & The Identity Of France
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
These are not matters solely of politics and finance; they are manifestations of the elite war on the identity of France.
As rationalists, we’re supposed to take the dramatic and profoundly tragic fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as random chance or bad luck. But I cannot be the only one who feels a symbolic tie between the near-destruction of a French religious and cultural icon and the embattled identity of France.
As it happens, I am reading Fernand Braudel’s massive two-volume history The Identity of France: Volume One: History and Environment and Volume Two: People and Production.
Longtime readers know I have often recommended Braudel’s three-volume history, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, as essential to the understanding of the rise of Capitalism in Europe:
The Structures of Everyday Life (Volume 1)
The Chinese famously view natural disasters and similar events as portents of political change, as disasters suggest the Emperor/ruling elite has lost the Mandate of Heaven. It is difficult not to see the disastrous fire in Notre Dame as just such a portent.
For the identity of France is under assault on a number of fronts. The left-leaning status quo has set up a false duality: one either worships multiculturalism and rejects a national identity as the sworn enemy of multiculturalism, or one is a rightist racist. Thus anyone who even refers to a national identity of France is quickly vilified and marginalized.
This is of course a false choice: one can value multiculturalism as an essential part of a national identity without sacrificing the entire notion of a national identity.
As Braudel notes at the end of Volume Two, France has long been ruled by tiny elites. A mere 242 financiers held contracts to collect taxes for the monarchy in the early 1700s; Braudel notes that “La Haute Banque in Paris, during the Restoration and later, consisted of a mere 25 families.”
In the highly centralized political power structure of today’s France, the leadership–from Macron down– are all graduates of a few select universities. Like Macron, the leadership was selected early and quickly advanced over lesser elites.
Globalized, hyper-financialized elitist Capitalism, so dependent on cheap immigrant labor for its servants, has left “deep France” behind, stripped of economic and political power, and relegated to dependency on the welfare state in rural regions (only the favored few and those with state-subsidized housing can afford to live in Paris).
These are not matters solely of politics and finance; they are manifestations of the elite war on the identity of France, to transform it into a bland, globalized hierarchy in which capital and power benefit the few, a system enforced by state propaganda and public virtue-signaling.
To quote Slavoj Žižek:
“The yellow vests movement fits the specific French Left tradition of large public protests targeting the political, more than the business or financial, elites. However, in contrast to the 68’ protests, the yellow vests are much more a movement of France profonde (‘deep France’), its revolt against big metropolitan areas, which means that its Leftist orientation is much more blurred.”
Here is Andrew Joyce (On Yellow Vests and Monsters):
“Amidst the sea of evasions, disavowals, and contradictions, it remains the case that the White working class has been abandoned by both the Old Right and the Left. In some cases, the White working class is the reason for the same evasions, disavowals, and contradictions: they are an uncomfortable, and now more visible, reminder of broken promises and unfulfilled obligations.
Guilluy adds that ‘the economic divide between peripheral France and the metropolises illustrates the separation of an elite and its popular hinterland. Western elites have gradually forgotten a people they no longer see. The impact of the gilets jaunes, and their support in public opinion (eight out of 10 French people approve of their actions), has amazed politicians, trade unions and academics, as if they have discovered a new tribe in the Amazon.’
I disagree that visibility, presented in passive terms, is the key issue here. In fact, I believe a better analogy would be that of an Amazonian tribe that had been systematically targeted for extinction, and was assumed to have been incapable of mustering any kind of resurgence.
We shouldn’t forget that it became common practice on the Left to pretend the White working class didn’t exist, and that it was also viewed as explicitly oppositional on the Left and among cosmopolitan elites to offer the White working class, as an ethno-economic group, any kind of material or ideological support.”
Lastly, here is Christophe Guilluy, author of Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France:
Employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places – in peripheral France (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain) – that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, “workers” no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock. … The globalised metropolises are the new citadels of the 21st century – rich and unequal, where even the former lower-middle class no longer has a place. Instead, large global cities work on a dual dynamic: gentrification and immigration. This is the paradox: the open society results in a world increasingly closed to the majority of working people.”
The corporate media, a key defender of the self-serving elite, will reject any symbolism in the near-destruction of Notre Dame. But deep down, many sense what cannot be spoken openly: the elites in France have lost the Mandate of Heaven.
* * *
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- China Tests Tactical Laser Similar To US Navy System
China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) unveiled a tactical laser system with a striking resemblance to a solid-state laser system tested by the US Navy in 2014, according to The Maritime Executive.
Appearing in a promotional video broadcast by state-owned channel CCTV, Beijing’s new laser can be deployed on both land and sea, and can be used for both close-in surface-to-surface combat and air defenses. According to CCTV, the laser could be mounted on the PLA Navy’s Type 055 destroyers as an alternative to the HHQ-10 surface-to-air missile.
China’s laser (left) vs. Kratos Defense XN-1 LaWS As The Maritime Executive notes, Beijing’s system looks limilar to the US Navy’s XN-1 LaWS system that was tested on the USS Ponce in 2014. The Navy reported that the system worked as designed against low-end asymmetric threats, and can be used at low power to dazzle enemies. At higher power it can fry sensors, burn out motors and detonate explosive materials. During one test, a UAV was able to shot down in as little as two seconds.
This is just the latest in China’s laser technology. In April, satellite photos revealed that Beijing has what appears to be a sophisticated anti-satellite laser base in Western China.
The satellite images were published by Indian Army Col. Vinayak Bhat, whose expertise is often widely cited in western media reports, and show a base with advanced satellite tracking capabilities and facilities which house large-scale lasers located about 145 miles south of the Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
A full report featuring the satellite imagery was published by the Washington Free Beacon which concluded alarmingly, “China likely is pursuing laser weapons to disrupt, degrade or damage satellites and their sensors and possibly already has a limited capability to employ laser systems against satellite sensors.”
The Xinjiang base is one of those laser bases that include four main buildings with sliding roofs that Bhat assesses contain high-powered chemical lasers powered by neodymium.
Bhat estimates that the smaller shed with the sliding roof is a laser tracker. Taken together, the Chinese can fire one to three of the lasers against an orbiting satellite that China is seeking to disrupt.
Giving credence to the claim, the report cites the US Defense Intelligence Agency which said in its own assessment published in February that China is set to deploy a ground based laser cannon at some point next year.
#China #space denial weapons.#PLA has deployed #DEW & #HEL to dazzle/disable/destroy satellites.#EMP & mobile pulse generators being experimented.#RISAT1 & #GSAT6A still fresh in mind.
Read more:
Need to harden own equipment.https://t.co/5csGt75rwG pic.twitter.com/04jFLwEpxK— 卫纳夜格@Raj (@rajfortyseven) March 23, 2019
Meanwhile, last July we reported that China has a “laser AK-47” which its manufacturer claimed could set fire to a target from almost one kilometer away (.62 miles). After naysayers doubted the gun’s capabilities, the South China Morning Post featured a test video in response to the critics.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The company says the filmed test was not conducted at maximum range, citing “safety reasons, to avoid anyone accidentally walking into the beam” — as the beam is invisible and the device without sound, various objects are shown igniting, including clothing and even a tire.
A company spokesman cited by the SCMP said “And after an upgrade it will be the world’s most advanced laser cannon – it will be able to take down a drone several kilometres away.”
- From Jesus Christ To Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies Of The State
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell
When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.
In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the state.”
That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely the latest victim of the police state’s assault on dissidents and whistleblowers.
On April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.
Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.
There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.
When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.
These are hard words, but hard times require straight-talking.
It is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.
What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.
Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.
And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.
Indeed, it is fitting that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the police state of his day.
A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle. In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire.
Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day had all of the characteristics of a police state: secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.
For all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.
Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.
Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.
Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.
Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.
Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.
A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor. A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state. Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.
Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Much like the Roman Empire, the American Empire has exhibited zero tolerance for dissidents such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manningwho exposed the police state’s seedy underbelly. Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.
Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers. Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.
Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.
Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.” The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:
The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”
Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.
Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.
Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.
What a marked contrast to the advice being given to Americans by church leaders to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do.
Telling Americans to march in lockstep and blindly obey the government—or put their faith in politics and vote for a political savior—flies in the face of everything for which Jesus lived and died.
Ultimately, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”
As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”
We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!
…Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?” But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.
In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth. We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?
- Mike 'Dirty Jobs' Rowe Routs America's School System: "We're Obsessed With Credentialing, Not Education"
Almost exactly a year ago, Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe noted that many Americans are dissatisfied with their lives because they no longer appreciate the intrinsic value of work.
Additionally, Rowe previously concluded, millions of reasonable people – Republicans and Democrats alike – are worried that our universities are doing a poor job of preparing students for the real world. They’re worried about activist professors, safe spaces, the rising cost of tuition, a growing contempt for history, a simmering disregard of the first amendment, and most recently the so-called ‘Varsity Blues’ scandal of systemic elite cheating into prestigious schools.
And on the heels of that, Mike Rowe slammed the system on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show last night, blasting Americans, and the American establishment for being “obsessed with credentialing, not education.”
“I think because stuck in this binary box, this or that. Right, blue-collar or white color, good job or a bad job. Higher education or higher alternative education.
When you only have two choices or you think you only have two choices, then you do one thing at the expense of the other.
So for instance, you know we have talked about this before, but it just seems so clear now. When four year degree universities needed a P.R. Campaign 40 years ago, they got one.
But the P.R. Came at the expense of all of the other forms of education. So it wasn’t hey, Tucker get your liberal arts degree because it will give you a broad base of appreciation for humanity. It was come if you don’t go get that degree, you will wind up over here turning a ranch or running a welding torch or doing some kind of consolation prize.
So we promoted the one thing at the expense of all of the others.
And that one thing just happened to be the most expensive thing. And so, look come I don’t think the skills set is the mystery. A reflection of what we value.
7 million — 7 million jobs available and they require training. Yet we are obsessed not really with education, you know. What we are obsessed with this credentialing.
People are buying diplomas. They are buying their degrees. It is a diploma dilemma, honestly. And it is expensive. It is getting worse. It’s not just the kids holding the note. It is us.”
All of which confirms his recent Facebook post, directing his frustration at the exorbitant cost of attending college, especially the elite schools that were involved with the scandal:
You don’t have to be rich or famous to believe your kid is doomed to fail without a four-year degree. Millions of otherwise sensible parents in every tax-bracket share this misguided belief, and many will do whatever it takes to get their kids enrolled in a “good school.” Obviously, those who resort to bribery are in a class by themselves, but what about parents who allow their kids to borrow vast sums of money to attend universities they can’t possibly afford? What about the guidance counselors and teachers who pressure kids to apply for college regardless of the cost? What about the politicians and lobbyists who so transparently favor one form of education at the expense of all the others? What about the employers who won’t even interview a candidate who doesn’t have a degree? Where’s the outrage?
The cost of college today has almost nothing to do with the cost of an education, and everything to do with the cost of buying a credential. That’s all a diploma is. Some are more expensive than others, but none of them reflect the character of the recipient, none are necessary to live a happy and prosperous life, and none of them come with any guarantees. And yet, the pressure we put on kids to borrow whatever it takes is constant, and precisely why tuition is so costly. It’s also why we have $1.6 trillion of student loans on the books along with a widening skills gap. That’s a bigger scandal, in my opinion.
Rowe has long been an advocate for trade and blue-collar skilled jobs. In many cases, these careers can earn similar salaries to those earned by college graduates.
- Diego Garcia: The "Unsinkable Carrier" Springs A Leak
Authored by Conn Hallinan via Counterpunch.org,
The recent decision by the Hague-based International Court of Justice that the Chagos Islands – with its huge U.S. military base at Diego Garcia – are being illegally occupied by the United Kingdom (UK) has the potential to upend the strategic plans of a dozen regional capitals, ranging from Beijing to Riyadh.
For a tiny speck of land measuring only 38 miles in length, Diego Garcia casts a long shadow. Sometimes called Washington’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” planes and warships based on the island played an essential role in the first and second Gulf wars, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Libya. Its strategic location between Africa and Indonesia and 1,000 miles south of India gives the U.S. access to the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the vast Indian Ocean. No oil tanker, no warship, no aircraft can move without its knowledge.
Most Americans have never heard of Diego Garcia for a good reason: No journalist has been allowed there for more than 30 years, and the Pentagon keeps the base wrapped in a cocoon of national security. Indeed, the UK leased the base to the Americans in 1966 without informing either the British Parliament or the U.S. Congress.
The February 25 Court decision has put a dent in all that by deciding that Great Britain violated United Nations Resolution 1514 prohibiting the division of colonies before independence. The UK broke the Chagos Islands off from Mauritius, a former colony on the southeast coast of Africa that Britain decolonized in 1968. At the time, Mauritius objected, reluctantly agreeing only after Britain threatened to withdraw its offer of independence.
The Court ruled 13-1 that the UK had engaged in a “wrongful act” and must decolonize the Chagos “as rapidly as possible.”
“The Great Game” in the Indian Ocean
While the ruling is only “advisory,” it comes at a time when the U.S. and its allies are confronting or sanctioning countries for supposedly illegal occupations – Russia in the Crimea and China in the South China Sea.
The suit was brought by Mauritius and some of the 1,500 Chagos islanders who were forcibly removed from the archipelago in 1973. The Americans, calling it “sanitizing” the islands, moved the Chagossians more than 1,000 miles to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they’ve languished in poverty ever since.
Diego Garcia is the lynchpin for U.S. strategy in the region. With its enormous runways, it can handle B-52, B-1 and B-2 bombers, and huge C-5M, C-17, and C-130 military cargo planes. The lagoon has been transformed into a naval harbor that can handle an aircraft carrier. The U.S. has built a city — replete with fast food outlets, bars, golf courses and bowling alleys — that hosts some 3,000 to 5,000 military personnel and civilian contractors.
What you can’t find are any native Chagossians.
The Indian Ocean has become a major theater of competition between India, the U.S., and Japan on one side, and the growing presence of China on the other. Tensions have flared between India and China over the Maldives and Sri Lanka, specifically China’s efforts to use ports on those island nations. India recently joined with Japan and the U.S. in a war game — Malabar 18 — that modeled shutting down the strategic Malacca Straits between Sumatra and Malaysia, through which some 80 percent of China’s energy supplies pass each year.
A portion of the exercise involved anti-submarine warfare aimed at detecting Chinese submarines moving from the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean. To Beijing, those submarines are essential for protecting the ring of Chinese-friendly ports that run from southern China to Port Sudan on the east coast of Africa. Much of China’s oil and gas supplies are vulnerable, because they transit the narrow Mandeb Strait that guards the entrance to the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz that oversees access to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The U.S. 5th Fleet controls both straits.
Tensions in the region have increased since the Trump administration shifted the focus of U.S. national security from terrorism to “major power competition” — that is, China and Russia. The U.S. accuses China of muscling its way into the Indian Ocean by taking over ports, like Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Gwadar in Pakistan that are capable of hosting Chinese warships.
India, which has its own issues with China dating back to their 1962 border war, is ramping up its anti-submarine forces and building up its deep-water navy. New Delhi also recently added a long-range Agni-V missile that’s designed to strike deep into China, and the right-wing government of Narendra Mori is increasingly chummy with the American military. The Americans even changed their regional military organization from “Pacific Command” to “Indo-Pacific Command” in deference to New Delhi.
The term for these Chinese friendly ports —”string of pearls” — was coined by Pentagon contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and, as such, should be taken with a grain of salt. China is indeed trying to secure its energy supplies and also sees the ports as part of its worldwide Road and Belt Initiative trade strategy. But assuming the “pearls” have a military role, akin to 19th century colonial coaling stations, is a stretch. Most the ports would be indefensible if a war broke out.
An “Historic” Decision
Diego Garcia is central to the U.S. war in Somalia, its air attacks in Iraq and Syria, and its control of the Persian Gulf, and would be essential in any conflict with Iran. If the current hostility by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. toward Iran actually translates into war, the island will quite literally be an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
Given the strategic centrality of Diego Garcia, it’s hard to imagine the US giving it up — or rather, the British withdrawing their agreement with Washington and de-colonizing the Chagos Islands. In 2016, London extended the Americans’ lease for 20 years.
Mauritius wants the Chagos back, but at this point doesn’t object to the base. It certainly wants a bigger rent check and the right eventually to take the island group back.
It also wants more control over what goes on at Diego Garcia. For instance, the British government admitted that the Americans were using the island to transit “extraordinary renditions,” people seized during the Afghan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2003, many of whom were tortured. Torture is a violation of international law.
As for the Chagossians, they want to go back.
Diego Garcia is immensely important for U.S. military and intelligence operations in the region, but it’s just one of some 800 American military bases on every continent except Antarctica. Those bases form a worldwide network that allows the U.S. military to deploy advisors and Special Forces in some 177 countries across the globe. Those forces create tensions that can turn dangerous at a moment’s notice.
For instance, there are currently U.S. military personal in virtually every country surrounding Russia: Norway, Poland, Hungary, Kosovo, Romania, Turkey, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. Added to that is the Mediterranean’s 6th Fleet, which regularly sends warships into the Black Sea.
Much the same can be said for China. U.S. military forces are deployed in South Korea, Japan, and Australia, plus numerous islands in the Pacific. The American 7th fleet, based in Hawaii and Yokohama, is the Navy’s largest.
In late March, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships transited the Taiwan Straits, which, while international waters, the Chinese consider an unnecessary provocation. British ships have also sailed close to Chinese-occupied reefs and islands in the South China Sea.
The fight to de-colonize the Chagos Islands will now move to the UN General Assembly. In the end, Britain may ignore the General Assembly and the Court, but it will be hard pressed to make a credible case for doing so. How Great Britain can argue for international law in the Crimea and South China Sea, while ignoring the International Court of Justice on the Chagos, will require some fancy footwork.
In the meantime, Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth calls the Court decision “historic,” and one that will eventually allow the 6,000 native Chagossians and their descendants “to return home.”
- Global Attention Spans Are Shrinking Amid Deluge Of Information
Thanks to information-overload in a hyperconnected world, people’s attention spans are decreasing, according to a recent study from the Technical University of Denmark.
Between social media, a “hectic news cycle” and everything else people have going on, people are spending less time on various topics, based on several metrics studied – including 40 years of movie ticket sales, google searches, Reddit comments and other domains.
“We wanted to understand which mechanisms could drive this behavior. Picturing topics as species that feed on human attention, we designed a mathematical model with three basic ingredients: ‘hotness’, aging and the thirst for something new,” says Dr. Philipp Hövel, lecturer for applied mathematics, University College Cork.
This model offers an interpretation of their observations. When more content is produced in less time, it exhausts the collective attention earlier. The shortened peak of public interest for one topic is directly followed by the next topic, because of the fierce competition for novelty. –EurekAlert
“The one parameter in the model that was key in replicating the empirical findings was the input rate – the abundance of information. The world has become increasingly well connected in the past decades. This means that content is increasing in volume, which exhausts our attention and our urge for ‘newness’ causes us to collectively switch between topics more rapidly.”
One metric studied was how long popular ‘hashtags’ – used to promote topics, remain on Twitter’s “top 50” global daily rankings.
In 2013, a hashtag would remain on the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours. In 2016, this decreased to 11.9 hours. Of course, we had the chaotic 2016 US election season in which a cocky billionaire predicted to lose wiped the floor with the GOP’s ‘top candidates’ (please clap), before defeating Establishment shoe-in Hillary Clinton in a dramatic upset finish.
Measuring the speed of hashtag dynamics: Average trajectories in top 50 Twitter hashtags from 2013 to 2016. In the background a 1% random sample of trajectories is shown in grey. And since the 2016 election, news cycles have been a long rolling boil of constant drama – with the left insisting that Trump is an illegitimate, unfit president who was elected with help from Vladimir Putin, and the right insisting that the left is, in not so many words, an intellectually challenged party of conspiracy theorists.
On top of the Trump-Russia hysteria dominating news cycles, we can add add terrorism, mass migration, constant alarm bells over climate change, and 2020 Democratic candidates trying to out-outrage each other, it’s no wonder people can’t focus on things the way they used to.
In short, we’re overloaded.
“It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has indeed become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example,” according to DTU Compute Professor Sune Lehmann.
Photo via csdesignworks blog Interestingly, the only exceptions to the diminished attention span appear to be Wikipedia and scientific publications.
While the study looked at the global attention span as a whole, it would be interesting to see how individual attention spans break down.
According to Lehmann; “Our data only supports the claim that our collective attention span is narrowing. Therefore, as a next step, it would be interesting to look into how this affects individuals, since the observed developments may have negative implications for an individual’s ability to evaluate the information they consume. Acceleration increases, for example, the pressure on journalists’ ability to keep up with an ever-changing news landscape. We hope that more research in this direction will inform the way we design new communication systems, such that information quality does not suffer even when new topics appear at increasing rates.”
- Respecting 'The Other'
Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,
One of my old friends’ father was at one time something of a Cold Warrior: he did something or other for the US defense establishment – nuclear submarine-related, if I recall correctly. This work activity apparently led him to develop a particularly virulent form of Russophobia; not so much a phobia as a pronounced loathing of all things Russian. According to my friend, her father would compulsively talk about Russia in overly negative terms. He would also sneeze a lot (allergies, perhaps), and she said that it was often difficult for her to distinguish his sneezes from his use of the word “Russia” as an expletive. But perhaps she was trying to draw a distinction without a difference: her father was allergic to Russia, his allergy caused him to sneeze a lot and also to develop a touch of Tourette’s, thus his sneezes came out sounding like “Russia!”
What had caused him to develop such a jaundiced view of Russia? The reason is easy to guess: his work activity on behalf of the government forced him to focus closely on what his superiors labeled as “the Russian threat.” Unfolded a bit, it would no doubt turn out that what Russia threatened was Americans’ self-generated fiction of overwhelming military superiority. Unlike the United States, which had developed any number of plans to destroy the Soviet Union (of which nothing ever came due to said lack of overwhelming military superiority) the Soviet Union had never developed any such plans. And this was utterly infuriating to certain people in the US. Was this truly necessary, or was this an accident?
We could take into account geopolitical, military or economic considerations, consider the (no longer relevant) clash of socialist vs. capitalist ideologies or any number of other irrelevancies. Or we could find hints of what’s really behind this syndrome from certain efforts to combat it. Consider this lyrics from Sting’s 1985 debut solo album “The Dream of Blue Turtles.” Sting sang soulfully: “I hope the Russians love their children too.” From what mystical source sprang Sting’s forlorn hope? That the Russians may be a race of soulless automatons hell-bent on wanton destruction of all life on Earth, but that perhaps there is just a tiny streak of humanity running through their character—they love their children too—and that it will hold them back? Sting’s Russia is almost pure evil, but not quite, and a tiny speck of goodness is what keeps the world balanced on the edge of destruction.
Looking at history, a different vista presents itself. Since it first came together as a superethnos (Great Rus) around ten centuries ago, Russia has been consistently attacked and invaded from the west. It has been invaded by the Swedes, the Germans, the Poles/Lithuanians, the French and the Germans again. Note that these are all Northern European ethnic groups; this turns out to be important. All of these incursions the Russians managed to repulse. Russia was also invaded from the east, by a large and diverse group of nomadic peoples collectively known as the Mongols (even though actual ethnic Mongols among them numbered no more than a thousand) and this eventually led to integration and either assimilation or peaceful coexistence.
Why such a difference? Why are the Russians and the Poles like oil and water in spite of both being Christian, neighbors and speaking a Slavic language. Why did the Russians and the Tatars and other Turkic groups fuse together through intermarriage in spite of vast differences in language, custom, religion and geographic origin? Let us propose a daring hypothesis: the reason is organic. Ethnic compatibilities and incompatibilities are not accounted for by any historical, cultural, religious or economic factors. They may be genetic, but they do not necessarily have anything to do with genealogy (relatedness) but could just as easily result from random mutations. They could be part of an innate friend-or-foe identification system—a rather coarse-grained one, that may have evolved at a time when hominids first progressed beyond bands and tribes and started forming the first ethnic groups.
This hypothesis may seem outlandish at first, but upon consideration it explains enduring conflicts much better than do any of the other factors—ideological, cultural, religious or economic. Consider the Thirty Years’ War which ravaged Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. Reading historical accounts of it makes it sound as if a set of obtuse theological arguments (far too obtuse for most of the participants to grasp) was resolved largely by slaughtering innocent civilians—an odd way to hold a scholastic disputation. But looking at the result an altogether different purpose becomes clear: that of delineating and separating incompatible ethnicities.
This incompatibility became clear in the New World. On the one side we have the Catholic Europeans (the Spanish, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the French) who happily went native, intermarrying with native tribes and forming new, racially and ethnically fused nations such as the Mexicans, the Brazilians, the Cubans and so on. On the other side we have Northern European, Protestant Europeans (the English, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Dutch and the Belgians) who refused to intermarry and insisted on forming highly segregated societies that persist to this day.
Acceptance of exogamy by the Catholics and insistence on endogamy by the Protestants (even unto the promulgation of racist laws against “miscegenation” in the US which were highly regarded and emulated by the German Nazis) cannot be accounted for by differences between Catholic and Protestant religious dogma, since these tendencies persist among the religious and the nonreligious alike. A far simpler explanation is that the Northern Europeans are internally compatible but largely incompatible with other groups while the Southern and Eastern Europeans are compatible with a much larger group. The superficial coincidence between ethnic compatibility and Protestantism/Catholicism is an artifact of the Thirty Years’ War and similar historical accidents.
What makes the understanding of ethnic compatibilities and incompatibilities important is that if they are ignored the result is a phenomenal amount of mayhem, murder and strife. Incompatible ethnic groups can thrive side by side provided they stay separate and cultivate a healthy respect for The Other. (The plantation economy of the US antebellum South, where a large number of Africans toiled on behalf of a tiny group of Europeans, is hardly such an example). Compatible ethnic groups fuse together through intermarriage and form new nations with no special effort required.
But history attests that mashing incompatible ethnic groups together through an enforced ideology, be it religious or secular in nature, produces very poor results. Yes, it is possible to boost the rate of intermarriage by shaming those who exhibit racist tendencies while rewarding those who intermarry as a way of signaling their virtuousness, and on the surface the resulting society does not appear broken. What breaks is its sense of itself. Being among compatible people, who accept you and whom you accept unconsciously and unconditionally, creates a sense of harmony and well-being, convincing you that the world is a good place and is to be nurtured and celebrated.
But being forced to live among incompatible people, whose acceptance of you, and yours of them, is based on an enforced ideology of sameness contradicted at every turn by your innate sense, creates a sense of disharmony and malaise, leading you to believe that the world is an evil place to be cleansed and purged of all that is offensive, be it your government, your neighbors or ancient statues. The resulting ethnos is a chimera—a nonviable composite entity that is ever in search of a means to destroy itself. The ideologies it generates range from nihilism to violent anarchism, from secessionist movements to revolutionary ones, from apocalyptic cults to devil-worship and from gang rape to cold-blooded mass murder. In historical events such as the Spanish Inquisition or Stalin’s purges, it is a waste of time to look for rational reasons for them. But if instead we examine them as resulting from clashes between incompatible ethnic groups, then a much clearer picture emerges.
One of the advantages of this approach over trying to pick apart complex and largely irrelevant questions of history, religion, culture and so on is that it can be based on readily available statistics: rate of intermarriage and viability of outcome (in terms of productivity and positive outcomes of the resulting family units). The inability to identify the organic mechanism underlying ethnic differentiation and incompatibility is, of course, a problem. But perhaps this mechanism will eventually be found, once enough evidence has been collected and cross-correlated with DNA samples. In the meantime, there is much more that is already understood about the nature of ethnos as an aspect of the Earth’s biosphere.
I will have more to say on this topic in the next installment. In the interim, I propose that there is just one safe and valid way to act when you sense another’s otherness: respect the otherness of others – and try to leave them well alone. Set aside your ideology of “humanity as a whole” (should you have one) for it will only cause trouble.
- China's Bond Vigilantes Loom As Economic Data Stabilizes
All hope-filled eyes are straining at tonight’s data deluge from China for signs that confirm the PMI spike (and exports rebound) that fueled the latest leg higher in global stocks and bond yields.
Remember, the official narrative is that after a rocky start to the year, the roll out of targeted stimulus has boosted investment, bouyed consumption and helped the manufacturing sector.
Or put another way, thanks to unprecedented injections of credit and endless fiscal and monetary largesse, Chinese stocks have tracked aggressively higher, following China’s world-leading credit impulse back from the abyss…
And thanks to that resurgence of China’s credit impulse (in the face of a Fed that has talked a lot but done nothing), the divergence between US and Chinese macro data performance is at an extreme…
And yet – amid all this exuberant indication – China GDP growth is expected to slow in Q1.
The headliner…
China Q1 GDP Growth YoY BEAT at +6.4% vs +6.3% expected (and +6.4% prior)
That is still equal to the weakest Chinese growth on record (at least 27 years), the same as the Q1 2009 plunge lows.
And the undercard:
China March Industrial Production YoY BEAT at +6.5% vs +5.6% expected (up from +5.3% prior)
China March Retail Sales YoY MEET at +8.3% vs +8.3% expected (up from +8.2% prior)
China March Fixed Asset Investment YoY MEET at +6.3% vs +6.3% expected (up from +6.1% prior)
China March Property Investment YoY ROSE to 11.8% from +11.6% YoY prior
China March Surveyed Jobless Rate FELL to 5.2% from 5.3% prior
Graphically…
All of which could be a problem.
As Bloomberg notes, for China bonds, already the worst performer among the world’s debt markets this year, things may be about to get worse. The figures tonight on the economy confirm broad improvement for March. That’ll tend to help stocks and sap demand for the safety of government debt. What’s more, the PBOC is adopting a hawkish tone, emphasizing it plans to control excessive money supply amid signs of a recovery. Overnight repo rates just jumped to the highest in 4 years…
As Bloomberg notes, much of this year’s rally in bonds and stocks have to do with the PBOC re-opening liquidity tap. But China’s central bank is now stepping back. Here’s the timeline:
The much anticipated reserve ratio cut on April did not materialise; the PBoC skipped open-market operations for 18 days in a row; this morning, the new MLF PBOC offered is not enough to cover the retiring one.
All of that suggests the government will have a tough time finding buyers for its 1- and 10-year bonds up for sale Wednesday.
And with Chinese yields accelerating at an extreme pace, we wonder if China’s unprecedented stimulus (record credit injections and endless fiscal and monetary promises) may be about to bite them in the arse as it appears there is at least one nation left with Bond Vigilantes still standing… who will stymie a fragile economic rebound with a soaring cost of capital and a vicious cycle that PBOC will struggle to escape – withdraw/slow stimulus chatter to avoid incendiary default-inducing rate spike (but face economic and equity market slump), or keep the pedal to the metal blowing bubbles around the world until it all goes pop.
In the immortal words of Britney Spears, “oops, they did it again.”
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