Mar 24

Today’s News 24th March 2018

  • Tolerance Cuts Both Ways: Freedom For The Speech We Hate

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    Tolerance cuts both ways.

    This isn’t an easy pill to swallow, I know, but that’s the way free speech works, especially when it comes to tolerating speech that we hate.

    The most controversial issues of our day – gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al. – have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

    “Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

    This haphazard approach to the First Amendment has so muddied the waters that even First Amendment scholars are finding it hard to navigate at times.

    It’s really not that hard.

    The First Amendment affirms the right of the people to speak freely, worship freely, peaceably assemble, petition the government for a redress of grievances, and have a free press.

    Nowhere in the First Amendment does it permit the government to limit speech in order to avoid causing offense, hurting someone’s feelings, safeguarding government secrets, protecting government officials, insulating judges from undue influence, discouraging bullying, penalizing hateful ideas and actions, eliminating terrorism, combatting prejudice and intolerance, and the like.

    Unfortunately, in the war being waged between free speech purists who believe that free speech is an inalienable right and those who believe that free speech is a mere privilege to be granted only under certain conditions, the censors are winning.

    We have entered into an egotistical, insulated, narcissistic era in which free speech has become regulated speech: to be celebrated when it reflects the values of the majority and tolerated otherwise, unless it moves so far beyond our political, religious and socio-economic comfort zones as to be rendered dangerous and unacceptable.

    Indeed, President Trump – who has been accused of using his very public platform to belittle and mock his critics and enemies while attempting to muzzle those who might speak out against him – may be the perfect poster child for this age of intolerance.

    Even so, Trump is not to blame for America’s growing intolerance for free speech.

    The country started down that sorry road long ago.

    Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) have conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good.

    On paper – at least according to the U.S. Constitution – we are technically free to speak.

    In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official – or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube – may allow.

    Free speech is no longer free.

    What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.

    Just as surveillance has been shown to “stifle and smother dissent, keeping a populace cowed by fear,” government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance, makes independent thought all but impossible, and ultimately foments a seething discontent that has no outlet but violence.

    The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world.

    When there is no steam valve – when there is no one to hear what the people have to say – frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation. By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.

    Silencing unpopular viewpoints with which the majority might disagree – whether it’s by shouting them down, censoring them, muzzling them, or criminalizing them – only empowers the controllers of the Deep State.

    Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned – discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred – inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.

    The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.

    This is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

    So where do we go from here?

    If Americans don’t learn how to get along – at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other’s right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different – then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

    The government will lock down the nation at the slightest provocation.

    Indeed, the government has been anticipating and preparing for civil unrest for years now, as evidenced by the build-up of guns and tanks and militarized police and military training drills and threat assessments and extremism reports and surveillance systems and private prisons and Pentagon training videos predicting the need to impose martial law by 2030.

    Trust me: when the police state cracks down, it will not discriminate.

    We’ll all be muzzled together.

    We’ll all be jailed together.

    We’ll all be viewed as a collective enemy to be catalogued, conquered and caged.

    Indeed, a recent survey concluded that a large bipartisan majority of the American public already recognizes the dangersposed by a government that is not only tracking its citizens but is also being controlled by a “Deep State” of unelected government officials.

    Thus, the last thing we need to do is play into the government’s hands by turning on one another, turning in one another, and giving the government’s standing army an excuse to take over.

    So let’s start with a little more patience, a lot more tolerance and a civics lesson on the First Amendment.

    What this means is opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some.

    It’s time to start thinking for ourselves again.

    It’s time to start talking to each other, listening more and shouting less.

    Most of all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s time to make the government hear us—see us—and heed us.

    This is the ultimate power of free speech.

  • Visualizing The Rising Problem Of Crypto Theft (And How To Protect Yourself)

    Part of the appeal of cryptocurrency is that it exists “outside” of the system.

    Using complex cryptography and decentralized ledgers, Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins explains, a blockchain can operate independently from the world’s most powerful countries, corporations, and banking institutions.

    While this detachment from authority is extremely powerful, existing almost exclusively in the digital realm does have its drawbacks.

    PREVENTING CRYPTO THEFT

    Today’s infographic from CryptoGo shows that as cryptocurrencies rise in prominence, so does its appeal to hackers, criminals, and other bad actors.

    With millions of dollars being stolen via crypto theft, investors and other dabblers in cryptocurrency must take precautions to protect their assets for the long haul.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    Crypto theft comes in many different forms, and at least $225 million of cryptocurrency has been stolen as of mid-2017.

    There are various forms of crypto theft that have made this possible, including brute forcing, phishing, phone-porting, mining malware, and Ponzi schemes.

    STRATEGIES USED BY CRYPTO THIEVES

    Here are the most prominent forms of crypto theft:

    Brute Forcing

    This is the form of hacking that most are familiar with. It involves automated software that simply tries different passwords until one works.

    Phone-Porting

    Using your phone number and a little “social engineering”, a hacker can convince a customer service rep that they are actually you. This allows them to reset your password and access your funds.

    Phishing

    In this case, a hacker will send you suspicious links through email or social media messages. By clicking on one of those links, malware is installed.

    Ponzi Schemes

    Multi-level marketing schemes that provide signing bonuses. These eventually collapse when prices change or signups stop. Once over, the thieves takes the money and run.

    Mining Malware

    Hackers hijack a computer’s power to mine cryptocurrency remotely.

    Protecting Yourself

    Crypto theft can be prevented by taking appropriate precautionary measures.

    These include using encrypted backups to hold private keys and other data, using proper anti-virus software for crypto, and opting for multi-factor authentication.

    Further, other general measures can also be taken to protect assets, such as holding only small amounts of cryptocurrency in hot wallets, using safety deposit boxes to store USB and private paper keys, turning off SMS authentication and email recovery options, and diversifying holdings through various exchanges.

  • US Doubles Down As Empire Declines

    Authored by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers via DissidentVoice.org,

    US empire is in decline. Reports of the end of the US being the unitary power in world affairs are common, as are predictions of the end of US empire. China surpassed the United States as the world economic leader according to Purchasing Power Parity Gross National Product, and Russia announced new weapons that can overcome the US’ defense systems.

    What is happening in the United States, in response, is to do more of what has been causing the decline. As the Pentagon outlined in its post-primacy report, the US’ plan is more money, more aggression and more surveillance. Congress voted nearly unanimously to give the Pentagon tens of billions more than it requested. Military spending will now consume 57% of federal discretionary spending, leaving less for basic necessities. The Trump administration’s new nominees to the State Department and CIA are a war hawk and a torturer. And the Democrat’s “Blue Wave” is composed of security state candidates.

    The US is escalating an arms race with Russia and China. This may create the mirror image of President Reagan forcing Russia to spend so much on its military that it aided in the break-up of the Soviet Union. The US economy cannot handle more military spending, worsening austerity when most people in the US are in financial distress.

    This is an urgent situation for all people in the world. In the US, we carry an extra burden as citizens of empire to do what we can to oppose US imperialism. We must be clear that it is time to end wars and other tools of regime change, to become a cooperative member of the world community and to prioritize the needs of people and protection of the planet.

    There are a number of opportunities to mobilize against US empire: the April 14-15 days of action, the Women’s March on the Pentagon in October and the mass protest planned against the military parade in November.

    Turmoil in Foreign Policy Leadership

    This week, President Trump fired Secretary of State Tillerson, nominated CIA director Mike Pompeo for the State Department and chose Gina Haspel to replace Pompeo at the CIA. As we write this newsletter, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is on the verge of being fired [since been fired and replaced by uber-hawk John Bolton]. The deck chairs are being rearranged on the Titanic but this will not correct the course of a failing foreign policy.

    The Pompeo and Haspel nominations are controversial. Pompeo believes torturers are patriots. He is a war hawk on every conflict and competing country, including Russia and especially Iran. And, unlike Tillerson, who stood up to Trump on occasion, Pompeo kisses-up to Trump, defending his every move. Haspel led a CIA black site torture center and ordered destruction of evidence to obstruct torture investigations.

    The Democrat’s record on torture is not good. President Obama said he would not prosecute Bush era torturers, infamously saying, “we need to look forwards as opposed to looking backwards.” John Brennan who was complicit in Bush-era torture, withdrew under pressure from becoming CIA director in 2008, instead becoming Deputy National Security Adviser, which did not require confirmation. After Obama’s re-election, Brennan became Obama’s CIA director.

    Brennan was inconsistent on whether torture worked. He tried to elevate Haspel, but the controversy around her prevented it. When the CIA spied on the US Senate Intelligence committee over their torture report, Brennan originally lied, denying the spying, but was later forced to admit it. He was not held accountable by either the Democrats or Obama.

    Haspel headed a black site in Thailand where torture was carried out. She ordered the destruction of 92 secret tapes documenting torture even thoughthe Senate Judiciary requested the tapes, as had a federal judge in a criminal trial. According to a federal court order, the tapes should have been turned over to comply with a FOIA request. Counsel for the White House and CIAsaid the tapes should have been preserved. Haspel’s actions should lead to prosecution, not to a promotion as head of the agency, as CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed torture and served time in prison for it, reminds us.

    The Trump nominations leave the Democrats on the cusp of a complete surrender on torture in an election year. Caving on torture by approving Pompeo and Haspel will anger Democratic voters and risk the high turnout need for their anticipated 2018 “Blue Wave”.

    Republican Senator Rand Paul says he will oppose both nominees. If all the Democrats oppose, the Senate will be split 50-50, requiring one more Republican to block the nominees. Fifteen Democrats supported Pompeo’s nomination as CIA director, so Democratic opposition is not ensured. Will Democrats oppose torture or be complicit in normalizing torture?

    Democrat’s Security State Blue Wave

    Militarism and war are bi-partisan. When Trump submitted a military budget, the Democrats almost unanimously joined with the Republicans to increase the budget by tens of billions of dollars. But, that is not all, a series of investigative reports by the World Socialist website reported the Democratic Party is becoming the party of military and intelligence candidates.

    The series identifies more than 50 military-intelligence candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as targets for 2018. The result, as many as half of all new congressional Democrats could come from the national security apparatus. An example is the victory in Pennsylvania by Conor Lamb, an anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-drug war, ex-Marine, which is being celebrated by Democrats.

    The Sanders-Democrats, working to make the Democratic Party a progressive people’s party, are being outflanked by the military-intelligence apparatus. In the end, Democratic Party leadership cares more about numbers than candidate’s policy positions.

    Patrick Martin writes:

    If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.

    Just as Freedom Caucus Tea Party representatives hold power in the Republican Party, the military-intelligence officials will become the powerhouse for Democrats. This takeover will make the Democrats even more militarist at a dangerous time when threats of war are on the rise and the country needs an opposition party that says ‘no’ to war.

    What does this mean? Kim Dotcom might be right when he tweeted, “The Deep State no longer wants to rely on unreliable puppets. They want to run politics directly now.” What does it mean politically? There is no two-party system on militarism and war. Those who oppose war are not represented and must build a political culture to oppose war at home and abroad.

    US Foreign Policy Elites in Denial About Russia’s New Weapons

    There is dangerous denial among US foreign policy elites about the Russian weapons systems announced by Putin in his state of the union speech last week. Military-intelligence analyst the Saker compares the US’ reaction to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. US elites are in the first two stages.

    The US does not have an adequate defense to the weapons announced by Putin. As the Saker writes, “Not only does that mean that the entire ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] effort of the USA is now void and useless, but also that from now US aircraft carrier battle groups can only be used against small, defenseless, nations!” US leadership cannot believe that after spending trillions of dollars, Russia has outsmarted their military with ten percent of their budget.

    Former Secretary of Defense William Perry exemplifies this denial, claiming Putin’s weapons are “phony,” exaggerated and do not really exist. Then he blames the Russians for starting an arms race. Of course, in both the National Security Strategy and Nuclear Posture Review, published before the Putin speech, the US announced an arms race.

    US political and military leadership brought this on themselves. The US’ leaving the SALT treaty in 2002 and expanding NATO to cover the Russian border led to Russia’s development of these new weapons.

    Further, Obama, and now Trump, support spending more than a trillion dollars to upgrade nuclear weapons. Perry falsifies history and blames Russia rather than looking in the mirror, since he was defense secretary during this era of errors.

    The new Russian weapons systems do not have to lead to an unaffordable arms race. The US should re-evaluate its strategy and find a diplomatic path to a multi-polar world where the US does not waste money on militarism. We can divest from the military economy and convert it to civilian economic investment, as the US has many needs for infrastructure, energy transition, health care, education and more.

    US global dominance is coming to an end. The issue is how will it end? Will the US hang on with an arms race and never-ending wars, or it will it wind down US empire in a sensible way. The Saker writes:

    The Russian end-goal is simple and obvious: to achieve a gradual and peaceful disintegration of the AngloZionist Empire combined with a gradual and peaceful replacement of a unipolar world ruled by one hegemon, by a multipolar world jointly administered by sovereign nations respectful of international law. Therefore, any catastrophic or violent outcomes are highly undesirable and must be avoided if at all possible. Patience and focus will be far more important in this war for the future of our planet than quick-fix reactions and hype. The ‘patient’ needs to be returned to reality one step at a time. Putin’s March 1st speech will go down in history as such a step, but many more such steps will be needed before the patient finally wakes up.

    As of now, the Pentagon and US leadership are in denial and not ready to face reality. The people of the United States, in solidarity with people of the world, must act now to end the war culture and convince US leadership that a new path is necessary.

  • Atlanta City Government Hit With Crippling Ransomware Attack

    In an unprecedented attack on the IT systems of a major municipal government, hackers are demanding ransom payable in bitcoin after seizing control of computers belonging to the Atlanta city government, AFP reports.

    The ransomware assault shut down multiple internal and external applications for the city, including apps that people use to pay bills and access court-related information, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told a news conference Thursday.

    The attack also impacted the city’s emergency-response services – forcing dispatchers answering 911 calls to take down reports with a paper and pen

    “This is a very serious situation,” Bottoms said.

    City officials said they learned of the attack before dawn Thursday when they detected unusual activity on their servers and discovered that some of the city’s data had been encrypted without their consent.

    Shortly after, the city government received a ransom note giving instructions for paying to free up files encrypted by the hackers.

    Atlanta

    The hackers – perhaps having learned from the relatively small take received during previous ransomware attacks like last year’s infamous “WannaCry” global assault – are demanding the city pay a relatively modest ransom: Six bitcoins – or about $51,000.

    Newsweek reports that a note provided to city officials included step-by-step instructions on how to pay. It linked to a website URL hosted on the dark web. But at a press conference led by Bottoms, officials told the public they are still assessing the extent of the attack.

    “The City of Atlanta has experienced a ransomware cyberattack,” confirmed chief operating officer Richard Cobbs during the briefing. This attack has encrypted some of the city data, however we are still validating the extent of the compromise.”

    A statement released to the public read: “The City of Atlanta is currently experiencing outages on various internal and customer facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information.”

    “At this time, our Atlanta Information Management team is working diligently with support from Microsoft to resolve the issue,” it added. “We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon.”

    Bottoms demurred when asked whether the city is contemplating paying the ransom.

    On the option of paying the ransom, Bottoms said: “We can’t speak to that right now, we will be looking for guidance specifically from our federal partners on how best to navigate the best course of action. Right now, we are focused on fixing the issue.”

    “The explanation is simple, we don’t know the extent. I would ask that people assume you may be included if personal data has been breached. We don’t know if it’s information related to just our employees or if it’s more extensive than that. Because we don’t know, I think it would be appropriate for the public to be vigilant checking their accounts and making sure credit agencies can also be notified.”

    The FBI warned in 2016 that victims of ransomware attacks should refrain from paying ransoms, explaining that it would not guarantee that their data would be released, and, furthermore, would only embolden criminals.

    That attack hit more than 200,000 companies, hospitals, government agencies and other organizations in 150 countries, but most of the victims opted to let their data be erased rather than pay the ransom.

    The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are investigating.

    WannaCry, Petya and other major ransomware attacks were carried out using NSA cyberweapons that were stolen by a group called the Shadowbrokers, who’ve been selling a cache of NSA weapons to whoever is willing to buy them – even launching a subscription service last year. It’s unclear what type of ransomware is being used in the Atlanta attack.

  • "Just A Few More Pips" – Watch The Hong Kong Dollar!

    Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

    On Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Central Banker Crisis Handbook it states very clearly, “do not make it worse.” It’s something like the Hippocratic oath where monetary authorities must first assess what their actions might do to an already fragile system. It’s why they take great pains to try and maintain composure, appearing calm and orderly while conflagration rages all around. The last thing you want to do is confirm the run.

    In modern times, that’s been taken to extremes where officials just outright lie – nothing to see here.

    Inflation hysteria has subsided to a considerable degree, thankfully. Going back to January 26 or so, markets aren’t quite as ready to embrace the lie as they were through all of last year. People are now paying attention to LIBOR-OIS when all they needed was the HKMA.

    Less than two weeks ago, on March 8, Norman Chan, CEO of Hong Kong’s monetary authority, issued a statement. It was the usual stuff about how HK has built up an enormous reserve buffer able to withstand any convertibility issues (how’d that work out in China with their much larger pile of forex?) Further, Chan says that HKD’s vomit-inducing drop is as much a good thing as any other kind of thing.

    The world is getting so much better, he wrote, so HKD’s outflows are merely restoration of normality. So far so good. Many people will buy that because the logical fallacy of appeal to authority is often unquestioned. Central bankers, we are conditioned to believe, know their stuff.

    But he titled his message:

    Stay calm on the weakening of the Hong Kong dollar

    D’oh. Today it’s 7.848, and just a few more pips to obligated intervention, perhaps as soon as Monday, maybe even tomorrow (though I suspect they’ve been in the market already).

    The more interesting part is CNY, or how it’s correlation (inverse) with HKD has now definitively broken (nearly two months). Whether it has permanently will be determined, I believe, by what happens at the 7.85 trigger. As I write for tomorrow:

    You didn’t really need LIBOR-OIS to suggest global dollar conditions are escalating the wrong way.

    There was repo and collateral (including gold) in September..

    Cross currency basis in December…

    Stock market liquidations sweeping across the globe in January…

    And now this.

    The one common trend through all of that was HKD.

    Why aren’t HKD traders remaining calm?

    For one, HKMA has never been here before. They quite literally don’t know what they are doing.

     

  • Drudge, Coulter Trash Trump Over "Fake Veto" As Base Rages

    Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter took to Twitter on Friday after President Trump “begrudgingly” signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending package – after threatening to veto it hours earlier over the “800,000 DACA recipients” which Trump said were “totally abandoned by the Democrats,” and the lack of funding for the “BORDER WALL.” 

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    Trump spent around 30 minutes on Friday doing his best to convince his base that, gosh dangit, he was “forced” to sign the bill in order to fully fund the military.

    In response to Trump bemoaning the legislation, claiming “I will never sign a bill like this again,” pundit and author Ann Coulter – a harsh critic of Trump whenever he strays from campaign promises, tweeted “Yeah, because you’ll be impeached.” 

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    Coulter then tweeted “CONGRATULATIONS, PRESIDENT SCHUMER!” 

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    Of note, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared the spending bill rushed through by Republicans a “victory.” 

    “The distinguished leader has clearly put forth many of the priorities that we’re very proud of in a bill that’s one yard high,” said Pelosi of House Speaker Paul Ryan at a joint press conference on Thursday. 

    “It’s one yard high,” Pelosi exclaimed – referring to the literal height of the legislation. “About half of it is the bill, a quarter of it is earmarks, and another quarter are report language.”

    Matt Drudge, meanwhile, loved his site The Drudge Report‘s headline “Fake Veto” so much that he tweeted out a screenshot! “Fake Veto,” of course, is a mockery of Trump’s co-opted catch phrase “Fake News” following Trump’s earlier tweet pretending to be on the fence. 

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    Other reactions around the twittersphere have echoed feelings of defeat: 

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    Translation; Trump got steamrolled and the base is furious.

    Meanwhile, here are the 25 House Republicans who opposed the bill:

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  • Paul Ehrlich: "Collapse Of Civilisation Is A Near Certainty Within Decades"

    Authored by Damian Carrington via The Guardian,

    Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge…

    A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.

    In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever.

    Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

    The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.

    Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but “the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual ‘world destroyer’ meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen”.

    The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968, predicted “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s – a fate that was avoided by the green revolution in intensive agriculture.

    Many details and timings of events were wrong, Paul Ehrlich acknowledges today, but he says the book was correct overall.

    “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.”

    Ehrlich has been at Stanford University since 1959 and is also president of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, which works “to reduce the threat of a shattering collapse of civilisation”.

    “It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems,” he says. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.”

    It is the combination of high population and high consumption by the rich that is destroying the natural world, he says. Research published by Ehrlich and colleagues in 2017 concluded that this is driving a sixth mass extinction of biodiversity, upon which civilisation depends for clean air, water and food.

    High consumption by the rich is destroying the natural world, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

    The solutions are tough, he says.

    “To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men.

    “I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable.”

    He estimates an optimum global population size at roughly 1.5 to two billion,

    “But the longer humanity pursues business as usual, the smaller the sustainable society is likely to prove to be. We’re continuously harvesting the low-hanging fruit, for example by driving fisheries stocks to extinction.”

    Ehrlich is also concerned about chemical pollution, which has already reached the most remote corners of the globe.

    “The evidence we have is that toxics reduce the intelligence of children, and members of the first heavily influenced generation are now adults.”

    He treats this risk with characteristic dark humour:

    “The first empirical evidence we are dumbing down Homo sapiens were the Republican debates in the US 2016 presidential elections – and the resultant kakistocracy. On the other hand, toxification may solve the population problem, since sperm counts are plunging.”

    Plastic pollution found in the most remote places on the planet show nowhere is safe from human impact. Photograph: Conor McDonnell

    Reflecting five decades after the publication of The Population Bomb (which he wanted to be titled Population, Resources, and Environment), he says: “No scientist would hold exactly the same views after a half century of further experience, but Anne and I are still proud of our book.” It helped start a worldwide debate on the impact of rising population that continues today, he says.

    The book’s strength, Ehrlich says, is that it was short, direct and basically correct. “Its weaknesses were not enough on overconsumption and equity issues. It needed more on women’s rights, and explicit countering of racism – which I’ve spent much of my career and activism trying to counter.

    “Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources.”

    Accusations that the book lent support to racist attitudes to population controlstill hurt today, Ehrlich says. “Having been a co-inventor of the sit-in to desegregate restaurants in Lawrence, Kansas in the 1950s and having published books and articles on the biological ridiculousness of racism, those accusations continue to annoy me.”

    But, he says: “You can’t let the possibility that ignorant people will interpret your ideas as racist keep you from discussing critical issues honestly.”

    More of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s reflections on their book are published in The Population Bomb Revisited.

  • Chinese Newspaper: Beijing Should Prepare For War In The Taiwan Straits

    On Thursday, a leading Chinese state-run newspaper announced the unthinkable: Beijing must prepare for “a direct military clash” over self-ruled Taiwan after a mid-level U.S. official arrived in Taipei on Tuesday, angering senior officials in Beijing.

    The atmosphere in Beijing started to get heated when Alex Wong, US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, arrived in Taipei on Tuesday. Wong became the first senior State Department official of the Trump administration to visit Taiwan since Washington approved the Taiwan Travel Act, which has already roiled ties and brought new pressures to Sino-US relations (refers to international relations between the U.S and China).

    Interesting enough, with trade war tensions escalating between Beijing and Washington, the pivot by the Trump administration over Taiwan has made the situation much worse.

    Local media reports cited Wong as stating the United States’ commitment to Taiwan has never been stronger, and that Washington will get international organizations to strengthen ties with Taipei.

    “Taiwan can no longer be excluded unjustly from international fora. Taiwan has much to share with the world,” Wong said at a reception attended by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, a member of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.

    “I can assure you, the United States government and the United States private sector will do their part to ensure Taiwan’s stellar international example shines brightly,” he added.

    In response, the senior editor of the Global Times declared China had to “strike back” against “Washington’s implementation of the Taiwan Travel Act.”

    “We must strike back against Washington’s implementation of the Taiwan Travel Act. First, Beijing should not invite senior officials of the US Department of State and Defense who visit Taiwan, to the mainland during their terms. For instance, Wong should not be invited to the mainland until he no longer occupies the post. Senior Taiwan officials who visit the US and meet publicly with high-level US officials should be treated alike. This won’t make the mainland suffer diplomatically. After all, Beijing and Washington have various channels to communicate.” 

    The editor then said,

    China can pressure the US in other areas of bilateral cooperation: for example, the Korean Peninsula issue and Iran nuclear issue. China can also set itself against the US in international organizations such as the UN. In addition, China needs to move fast to establish diplomatic ties with allies of Taiwan to further squeeze the island’s space in the international community.”

    At the end of the piece, the editor dropped the mother of all bombshells, “Mainland [China] must prepare itself for a direct military clash in the Taiwan Straits.”

    The mainland must also prepare itself for a direct military clash in the Taiwan Straits. It needs to make clear that escalation of US-Taiwan official exchanges will bring serious consequences to Taiwan. This newspaper has suggested that the mainland can send military planes and warships across the Taiwan Straits middle line. This can be implemented gradually depending on the cross-Straits situation.

    Preventing the Taiwan independence movement and promoting unification through peaceful ways can be costly, perhaps costing more than the short-term loss brought about by forceful unification. It’s a misunderstanding to think that peaceful unification will be a harmonious and happy process. The Taiwan authority will only turn around when left with no choice. Sticks matter more than flowers on the path to peaceful reunification.

    China Uncensored provides us with the knowledge that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has already made the preparations to invade Taiwan by 2020.

    Earlier this week, the New Straits Times reported that China sailed its aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait, in response to Wong’s Taipei trip.

    Taiwan said Wednesday it had scrambled jets and sent ships to track a Chinese aircraft carrier which passed through the Taiwan Strait as Beijing’s leader gave the island a fierce warning against separatism. The Liaoning and accompanying vessels entered Taiwan’s air defence zone on Tuesday, the same day Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a blistering nationalistic speech – warning against what he called any attempts to split China.  

    While the Global Times says China should prepare for military action against Taiwan, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Trump administration coupled with military–industrial complex is preparing for the next great war in the East. This time around, perhaps, we have gained an important clue that war with China starts with Taiwan.

  • The Digital-Military-Industrial Complex Exposed

    Authored by Tamsin Shaw via NYBooks.com,

    The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

    Apparently, the age of the old-fashioned spook is in decline.

    What is emerging instead is an obscure world of mysterious boutique companies specializing in data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies.

    As they say about hedge funds, if the general public has heard their names that’s probably not a good sign. But there is now one data analysis company that anyone who pays attention to the US and UK press has heard of: Cambridge Analytica. Representatives have boasted that their list of past and current clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NATO. Nevertheless, they became recognized for just one influence campaign: the one that helped Donald Trump get elected president of the United States. The kind of help the company offered has since been the subject of much unwelcome legal and journalistic scrutiny.

    Carole Cadwalladr’s recent exposé of the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica shows that the company, along with its partner, SCL Group, should rightly be as a cautionary tale about the part private companies play in developing and deploying government-funded behavioral technologies. Her source, former employee Christopher Wylie, has described the development of influence techniques for psychological warfare by SCL Defense, the refinement of similar techniques by SCL Elections through its use across the developing world (for example, a “rumor campaign” deployed to spread fear during the 2007 election in Nigeria), and the purchase of this cyber-arsenal by Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica, and who, with the help of Wylie, Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix, deployed it on the American electorate in 2016.

    But the revelations should also prompt us to ask deeper questions about the kind of behavioral science research that enables both governments and private companies to assume these powers.

    Two young psychologists are central to the Cambridge Analytica story. One is Michal Kosinski, who devised an app with a Cambridge University colleague, David Stillwell, that measures personality traits by analyzing Facebook “likes.” It was then used in collaboration with the World Well-Being Project, a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center that specializes in the use of big data to measure health and happiness in order to improve well-being. The other is Aleksandr Kogan, who also works in the field of positive psychology and has written papers on happiness, kindness, and love (according to his résumé, an early paper was called “Down the Rabbit Hole: A Unified Theory of Love”). He ran the Prosociality and Well-being Laboratory, under the auspices of Cambridge University’s Well-Being Institute.

    Despite its prominence in research on well-being, Kosinski’s work, Cadwalladr points out, drew a great deal of interest from British and American intelligence agencies and defense contractors, including overtures from the private company running an intelligence project nicknamed “Operation KitKat” because a correlation had been found between anti-Israeli sentiments and liking Nikes and KitKats. Several of Kosinski’s co-authored papers list the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, as a funding source. His résumé boasts of meetings with senior figures at two of the world’s largest defense contractors, Boeing and Microsoft, both companies that have sponsored his research. He ran a workshop on digital footprints and psychological assessment for the Singaporean Ministry of Defense.

    For his part, Aleksandr Kogan established a company, Global Science Research, that contracted with SCL, using Facebook data to map personality traits for its work in elections (Kosinski claims that Kogan essentially reverse-engineered the app that he and Stillwell had developed). Kogan’s app harvested data on Facebook users who agreed to take a personality test for the purposes of academic research (though it was, in fact, to be used by SCL for non-academic ends). But according to Wylie, the app also collected data on their entire—and nonconsenting—network of friends. Once Cambridge Analytica and SCL had won contracts with the State Department and were pitching to the Pentagon, Wylie became alarmed that this illegally-obtained data had ended up at the heart of government, along with the contractors who might abuse it.

    This apparently bizarre intersection of research on topics like love and kindness with defense and intelligence interests is not, in fact, particularly unusual. It is typical of the kind of dual-use research that has shaped the field of social psychology in the US since World War II.

    Much of the classic, foundational research on personality, conformity, obedience, group polarization, and other such determinants of social dynamics—while ostensibly civilian—was funded during the cold war by the military and the CIA. The cold war was an ideological battle, so, naturally, research on techniques for controlling belief was considered a national security priority. This psychological research laid the groundwork for propaganda wars and for experiments in individual “mind control.” The pioneering figures from this era—for example, Gordon Allport on personality and Solomon Asch on belief conformity—are still cited in NATO psy-ops literature to this day.

    The recent revival of this cold war approach has taken place in the setting of the war on terror, which began in 1998 with Bill Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 62, making terrorism America’s national security priority. Martin Seligman, the psychologist who has bridged the military and civilian worlds more successfully than any other with his work on helplessness and resilience, was at the forefront of the new dual-use initiative. His research began as a part of a cold war program of electroshock experiments in the 1960s. He subjected dogs to electric shocks, rendering them passive to the point that they no longer even tried to avoid the pain, a state he called “learned helplessness.” This concept then became the basis of a theory of depression, along with associated ideas about how to foster psychological resilience.

    In 1998, Seligman founded the positive psychology movement, dedicated to the study of psychological traits and habits that foster authentic happiness and well-being, spawning an enormous industry of popular self-help books. At the same time, his work attracted interest and funding from the military as a central part of its soldier-resilience initiative. Seligman had previously worked with the CIA and even before September 11, 2001, his new movement was in tune with America’s shifting national security priorities, hosting in its inaugural year a conference in Northern Ireland on “ethno-political conflict.”

    But it was after the September 11 attacks that terrorism became Seligman’s absolute priority. In 2003, he said that the war with jihadis must take precedence over all other academic research, saying of his colleagues: “If we lose the war, the laudable, but pet projects they endorse, will not be issues… If we win this war, we can go on to pursue the normal goals of science.” Money poured into the discipline for these purposes. The Department of Homeland Security established Centers of Excellence in universities for interdisciplinary research into the social and psychological roots of terrorism. Elsewhere, scholars worked more obliquely on relevant behavioral technologies.

    Some of the psychological projects cultivated under the banner of the war on terror will be familiar to many readers. Psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, and their colleagues in other disciplines (most prominently, the Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein) rehabilitated the cold war research on “group polarization” as a way of understanding not, this time, the radicalism that feeds “totalitarianism,” but the equally amorphous notion of “extremism.” They sought to combat extremism domestically by promoting “viewpoint diversity” both on campus (through organizations such as the Heterodox Academy, run by Haidt and funded by libertarian billionaire Paul Singer) and online, suggesting ways in which websites might employ techniques from social psychology to combat phenomena such as “confirmation bias.” Their notion of “appropriate heterogeneity” (Sunstein) in moral and political views remains controversial.

    Seligman himself saw the potential for using the Internet to bring his research on personality together with new ways of gathering data. This project began shortly after the September 11 attacks, with a paper on “Character Strengths Before and After September 11,” which focused on variations in traits such as trust, love, teamwork, and leadership. It ultimately evolved into the innovative World Well-Being Project at Penn. Seligman also fostered links with Cambridge University, where he is on the board of the Well-Being Institute that employs the same kind of psychometric techniques. The aim of these programs is not simply to analyze our subjective states of mind but to discover means by which we can be “nudged” in the direction of our true well-being as positive psychologists understand it, which includes attributes like resilience and optimism. Seligman’s projects are almost all funded by the Templeton Foundation and may have been employed for entirely civilian purposes. But in bringing together the personality research and the behavioral technologies that social psychologists had for decades been refining with the new tool of big data (via the astonishing resources provided by social media), it has created an important template for what is now the cutting-edge work of America’s intelligence community.

    In 2008, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates commissioned the Minerva Initiative, funded by the DoD, which brought researchers in the social sciences together to study culture and terrorism, and specifically supported initiatives involving the analysis of social media. One of the Cornell scientists involved also participated in the famous and controversial Facebook study of emotional contagion. Less well known is the Open Source Indicators program at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA (a body under the Director of National Intelligence), which has aimed to analyze social media in order to predict social unrest and political crises.

    In a 2014 interview, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, speaking then as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that such open-source data initiatives, and in particular the study of social media such as Facebook, had entirely transformed intelligence-gathering. He reported that traditional signals intelligence and human intelligence were increasingly being replaced by this open-source work and that the way in which intelligence agents are trained had been modified to accommodate the shift. A growing portion of the military’s $50 billion budget would be spent on this data analytics work, he claimed, creating a “gold rush” for contractors. A few weeks after this interview, Flynn left the DIA to establish the Flynn Intel Group Inc. He later acted as a consultantto the SCL Group.

    Carole Cadwalladr reported in The Observer last year that it was Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Alphabet founder Eric Schmidt, who made SCL aware of this gold rush, telling Alexander Nix, then head of SCL Elections, that the company should emulate Palantir, the company set up by Peter Thiel and funded with CIA venture capital that has now won important national security contracts. Schmidt threatened to sue Cadwalladr for reporting this information. But Nix recently admitted before a parliamentary select committee in London that Schmidt had interned for Cambridge Analytica, though he denied that she had introduced him to Peter Thiel. Aleksandr Kogan and Christopher Wylie allowed Cambridge Analytica to evolve into an extremely competitive operator in this arena.

    It was by no means inevitable that dual-use research at the intersection of psychology and data science would be employed along with illegally-obtained caches of data to manipulate elections. But dual-use research in psychology does seem to present a specific set of dangers. Many areas of scientific research have benefited from dual-use initiatives. The National Cancer Institute began its life in the early 1970s as part of a coordinated program examining the effects of tumor agents developed as bio-weapons at Fort Detrick. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, similarly, researched the effects of militarily manufactured hazardous viruses. This was the foundation of a biotechnology industry that has become a paradigm case of dual use and has led, in spite of its more sinister side, to invaluable medical breakthroughs. But the development of behavioral technologies intended for military-grade persuasion in cyber-operations is rooted in a specific perspective on human beings, one that is at odds with the way they should be viewed in democratic societies.

    I’ve written previously about the way in which a great deal of contemporary behavioral science aims to exploit our irrationalities rather than overcome them. A science that is oriented toward the development of behavioral technologies is bound to view us narrowly as manipulable subjects rather than rational agents. If these technologies are becoming the core of America’s military and intelligence cyber-operations, it looks as though we will have to work harder to keep these trends from affecting the everyday life of our democratic society. That will mean paying closer attention to the military and civilian boundaries being crossed by the private companies that undertake such cyber-operations.          

    In the academic world, it should entail a refusal to apply the perspective of propaganda research more generally to social problems. From social media we should demand, at a minimum, much greater protection of our data. Over time, we might also see a lower tolerance for platforms whose business model relies on the collection and commercial exploitation of that data. As for politics, rather than elected officials’ perfecting technologies that give them access to personal information about the electorate, their focus should be on informing voters about their policies and actions, and making themselves accountable.

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