Nov 24

Today’s News 24th November 2018

  • Paul Craig Roberts On Assange: "Justice Has Disappeared In The West"

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    Revenge Is Mine Saith Washington

    Justice has disappeared in the West. In Justice’s place stands Revenge. This fact is conclusively illustrated by Julian Assange’s ongoing eight year ordeal.

    For eight years Julian Assange’s life has been lived in a Kafka Police State. He has been incarcerated first under British house arrest and then in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, despite the absence of any charges filed against him.

    Meanwhile, the entirety of the Western world, with the exception of former Educadoran President Rafael Correa and a UN agency that examined the case and ruled Assange was being illegally detained by the UK government’s refusal to honor his grant of political asylum, has turned its back to the injustice.

    Assange is locked away in the Ecuadoran Embassy, because to protect him from false arrest, former Ecuadoran President Correa gave him political asylum. However, the corrupt and servile UK government that serves Washington, and not justice or law, refused to honor Assange’s asylum. The US vassal known as the UK stands ready to arrest Assange on Washington’s orders if he steps outside the embassy and to hand him over to Washington, where a large number of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have said he should be executed. The Trump regime, carrying on the illegal practices of its forebears, has a secret indictment waiting to be revealed once they have their hands on Assange.

    The current president of Ecuador a servant of Washington, Lenin Moreno – a person so lacking in character that his name is an insult to Lenin – is working a deal with Washington to rescind Assange’s grant of asylum so that the Ecuadoran Embassy in London has to expel Assange into the hands of Washington.

    What has Assange done? He has done nothing but to tell the truth. He is a journalist who heads Wikileaks, a news organization that publishes leaked documents – exactly as the New York Times published the leaked Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. Just as the publication of the Pentagon Papers embarrassed the US government and helped to bring about the end of the senseless Vietnam War, the documents leaked to Wikileaks embarrassed the US government by revealing Washington’s war crimes, lies, and deception of the American people and US allies.

    The allies, of course, were bought off by Washington and remained silent, but Washington intends to crucify Assange for the embarrassment and payoff expense he caused the criminal government in Washington.

    In order to assert authority over Assange, Washington is using the extra-territoriality of US law, a claim that Washington bases not on law but on might alone and uses to violate the sovereignty of independent countries. Assange is a citizen of Australia and Ecuador. He is not subject to US law. Even if he were, he has committed no espionage. The false equivalence Washington is trying to establish between the exercise of the First Amendment and treason shows how totally lost are the American people. The silence of the US media demonstrates that the presstitutes don’t mind losing the First Amendment’s protection as they have no intention of telling any truths.

    Washington’s secret indictment – it is secret so that two-bit punks such as James Ball can write in the Guardian that Assange faces no threat of arrest – most likely accuses Assange of espionage. But it is not legally possible to accuse a non-citizen operating outside the country of espionage. All countries engage in espionage. Every country on earth could accuse Washington of espionage and arrest the CIA. The CIA could, as it often has, accuse Israel of espionage. Of course, any Israeli, such as Jonathan Pollard, who is convicted of espionage in the US becomes a point of contention between Washington and Israel and Israel always wins. The corrupt Obama regime released Pollard from his life sentence on orders and, no doubt, generous bribes, from Israel.

    If Assange were Israeli, he would be home free, but he is a citizen of two countries whose governments place high value on being Washington’s vassals.

    There was a time in America, many decades ago, when the Democrats stood for justice and the Republicans stood for greed.

    There was a time in America, prior to 9/11, when the media would have rushed to the defense of the freedom of the press and defended Assange from his mistreatment and false charges. To be sure that the reader understands the mistreatment of Assange, it is identical to the mistreatment of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty of Hungary whose asylum in the US Embassy in Budapest was not acknowledged by the Soviet government, forcing Mindszenty to live out all but three years of his remaining life in the US embassy.

    President Nixon negotiated his release in 1971, but the Nixon haters give Nixon no credit for his attention to one man locked away in an injustice part of the earth.

    Today there is no such attention to injustice except for the “victim” groups in Identity Politics. Where is the champion of Assange now that Rafael Correa has to live abroad to avoid persecution by Washington’s puppet Moreno?

    The weakness of the intellect in the West is scary. Caitlin Johnstone tells us about it:

    “Trump’s despicable prosecution of Assange, and corporate liberalism’s full-throated support for it, has fully discredited all of mainstream US politics on both sides of the aisle. Nobody in that hot mess stands for anything. If you’re still looking to Trump or the Democrats to protect you from the rising tide of fascism, the time to make your exit is now.”

    The entirety of the Western print and TV media—even Russia’s RT—serves as a propaganda ministry for Washington against Assange. For example, we read over and over that Assange is hiding out in the London Ecuadoran Embassy to avoid rape charges in Sweden. That the presstitutes and the feminists can keep this bogus claim alive despite all the official repudiation of it shows the Matrix in which Western peoples are corralled.

    Assange has never been charged with rape. The two Swedish women who seduced him and brought him into their beds in their homes never said he raped them. Assange’s tribulations began when one of the women who seduced him worried that he did not use a condom and that he might have HIV or Aids. She asked Assange to take a test to see if he was sex disease free, and Assange, offended, refused. This was his mistake. He should have said, “of course, I understand your concern” and taken the test.

    The woman went to the police to see if Assange could be forced to take the test. It was the police who turned this into a rape investigation. Charges were brought, and the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dropped all charges as the sex was consensual.

    Assange left Sweden legally, not in flight as the story that Washington has planted has it. He went to England, another mistake as England is Washington’s playground. Washington and/or lesbian feminists lusting for the conviction of a heterosexual male convinced a female Swedish prosecutor to reopen the closed case.

    In an unprecedented act, the Swedish prosecutor issued an order to the UK for Assange to be handed over for questioning. Extradition orders are only valid for filed charges, and there were no filed charges, only dismissed charges. Never before had even the corrupt UK government granted an extradition order for questioning. The UK government, Washington’s puppet, agreed to hand over Assange to Sweden. It was completely clear as there was no case in Sweden against Assange that the Swedish prosecutor, probably for a large sum, would turn Assange over to Washington, a place in which no legal protections exist for anyone, not even for those, such as whistleblowers, who are protected by US law, but, despite the protection of law, nevertheless go to prison.

    Seeing what was coming, Assange was granted political asylum by President Correa and escaped house detention in the UK to make it to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he has been ever since, despite the Swedish government’s dropping of all charges against Assange and again closing the investigation.

    In the meantime a US attorney, corrupt as they all are – never believe any federal indictment as they are created out of whole cloth without any need of evidence – managed to convince an incompetent American grand jury to indict Assange for what we do not yet know, but most likely for espionage.

    The US grand jury that approved the secret indictment has no comprehension that they indicted a person for telling the truth precisely as protected – and required if government is to be controlled by the people—by the US Constitution. All Assange did was to publish documents sent to Wikileaks by a person with a moral conscience who was disturbed at the blatant criminality and inhumanity of the US government.

    There is no legal difference whatsoever between Wikileaks publishing the documents leaked to Wikileaks, and the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers leaked to the New York Times.

    The difference is the difference in time. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, the media had not been concentrated into a few hands by the corrupt Clinton regime, and 9/11, which was used by Dick Cheney to criminalize truth-telling, had not occurred. Therefore in the 1970s it was still possible that some important part of the media might tell the truth. Nevertheless, the only reason that the NYTimes published the Pentagon Papers is that the newspaper hated Richard Nixon, who the Democratic media blamed for the Vietnam War even though it was Democratic President Johnson’s war and Nixon wanted to end it.

    When the insouciant American and Western peoples accept their governments’ lies, they accept their own demise and servitude. The willingness and abandon with which the Western peoples submit makes one conclude that they prefer servitude. They don’t want to be free, because freedom has too many responsibilities, and they don’t want the responsibilities. They want go watch a movie, or a TV program, or play video games, or have sex, go shopping, get drunk, have a drug high, or whatever form of amusement that they value far more than they value liberty, or truth, or justice.

    To a person of my disappearing generation, it is inexplicable that the nations of the world, much less Americans, would stand moot while the world’s best, most trusted and most honest journalist is set up by a totally corrupt US government for destruction. The result of Assange’s persecution will be to criminalize embarrassing the US government.

    When I contemplate this massive injustice to which the peoples of the world reply with silence, I wonder if those trying to save Western Civilization are not misguided. What is the point of saving a totally corrupt civilization?

    Those who attack Assange are despicable. If you have a chance to push one or more of those who are members of the lynch mob in front of a truck, think of the act as a cleansing opportunity.

  • Japanese Man Marries Teenage Girl Hologram  

    Akihiko Kondo, 35, who teaches at a middle school in Tokyo, married Hatsune Miku, a virtual hologram of a teenage girl, earlier this month, Reuters reports.

    The hologram, which takes the shape of a 16-year-old girl with long, turquoise ponytails, “is a singing voice synthesizer featured in over 100,000 songs,” according to Crypton Future Media, the company behind the digital character.

    Despite strong disapproval and complete embarrassment from his family, Kondo married the hologram in Tokyo on November 04. The wedding, which cost over $18,000, was attended by 40 guests — excluding all of Kondo’s immediate family members.

    A light inside a two-foot-high $2,800 Amazon Echo-esque device, projects the bride into an image, was represented at the wedding by a “cat-sized stuffed doll.”

    While he acknowledged the traditional path to marriage, Kondo told Reuters Television that, “the shape of happiness and love is different for each person.

    “There definitely is a template for happiness, where a real man and woman get married, have a child and live all together. But I don’t believe such a template can necessarily make everyone happy.”

    Kondo, who decided at an early age that he would never discover the perfect someone, said he found Hatsune Miku on the internet and instantly fell in love.

    After spending many long nights on the internet with Hatsune Miku, he then figured out Miku was “the one,” for some time, Kondo became devoted to his virtual girlfriend, who has hundreds of thousands of other fans worldwide.

    Kondo received congratulations from friends and other Hatsune Miku fans on social media. Likewise, he was also accused of being a “creepy otaku,” or a geek for marrying a virtual teenage girl.

    A marriage registration application from Gatebox, the company behind the virtual hologram device, was offered for those who wanted to marry virtual characters. However, Kondo soon found out that marrying something that is not real has no legal grounds.

    Gatebox – Promotion Video 

    A few weeks since the wedding, Kondo told Reuters that people are contacting him on social media, “saying they were encouraged” and it has given them strength.

    Kondo ends the interview by saying:

    “I never cheated on her; I’ve always been in love with Miku-san…I’ve been thinking about her every day.”

    Do you think Kondo has had her checked out for any infections or viruses? 

  • The Final Push for Idlib Will Come Soon

    Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The situation in Syria is that of a frozen conflict, following the agreements made between Russia, Turkey and Syria on the demilitarized zone created around Idlib. Except for some sporadic terrorist attacks, the truce seems to be holding up over the last few weeks, even though it has become clear to everyone what the next step is for the province.

    The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has been busy eradicating Daesh in the southern part of Syria in recent weeks, concentrating its efforts on securing all areas that have been liberated from terrorist control but which still remain vulnerable to sporadic attacks, as occurred in Sweida at the end of July 2018. In that incident, there were dozens of victims and numerous abductees who remained in the hands of Daesh for months. This caused the Syrian population in neighbouring areas to clamor for protection, forcing the SAA to undertake an anti-terrorist campaign that has been ongoing since August.

    This effort by the SAA has slowed down in part due to subsequent events, with an agreement reached between Erdogan and Putin to create a demilitarized zone in the province of Idlib. From October 15, an area spanning 20 kilometres and guarded by Turkish and Russian troops guarantees a separation between the SAA and terrorist groups in the province.

    Russian and Syrian efforts have been moving in two very specific directions over the last few weeks. While Moscow supplies Damascus with new equipment in preparation for the future advance on Idlib, Putin and his entourage continue diplomatic efforts to draw more of Syria’s enemies closer to the Russia-Iran-Syria axis. The meeting that brought about the demilitarized zone included Macron and Merkel, the Europeans having evidently come to terms with the impossibility of overthrowing the legitimate government of Syria. Macron and Merkel were offered a way out of the Syrian conflict, decoupling themselves from the belligerent stance of the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The intention is to usher Paris and Berlin towards the same direction Qatar, Turkey and Jordan have been progressively gravitating. Certainly, these are not countries to be considered friends of Damascus. Rather, they are parties with whom a constructive dialogue needs to be entered into in order to advance common diplomatic interests.

    Moscow has often found it possible to reach an agreement or start unpublicized negotiations with each of these parties. Erdogan seems to have preferred an agreement with Putin rather than waiting for the liberation of Idlib by the SAA, thus being able to postpone the natural conclusion of the war that will find him sitting at the table defeated. At the same time, Erdogan wants to concentrate on the Kurds in order to secure the border between Syria and Turkey controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and to prevent any partition of Syrian territory that would favor other parties. Jordan has even reopened the border crossings with Syria, appearing to be the first country in opposition to Damascus that is now taking practical steps to mend fences.

    The case of the participation of the two European countries at the summit with Erdogan and Putin is more complex. The rift between Washington and the other European capitals is wide and well documented, even more so after the events in Paris commemorating the end of the First World War. Macron and Trump seem to be diverging further in terms of policy and ideology, while Trump and Merkel have always had their differences. Trump’s choices in the Middle East, in the wake of the destructive actions of Israel and Saudi Arabia, marked a profound point of difference and mistrust with the European allies. Macron and Merkel have a huge problem dealing with refugees flowing from areas in North Africa and the Middle East destroyed by US-led wars. The prospect of working with Erdogan, and indirectly with Damascus, to bring back hundreds of thousands of refugees currently in France and especially Germany, seems to have been Putin’s winning argument during the talks in Istanbul.

    This slow diplomatic approach has been accelerated as a result of Israel’s downing of a Russian electronic-surveillance aircraft. The need to avoid a direct conflict between Moscow and Tel Aviv allowed the Russian missile forces to deploy to Syria an advanced model of the S-300 in addition to the existing S-300/400 systems on the ground. The presence of these advanced systems, and Moscow’s threats to use them, together with American concerns over the possibility of an F-35 being shot down by Soviet systems dating from the 1970s, forced the Zionist entity to halt its attacks on Syria.

    This situation has helped to create a frozen conflict in the country. Together with the agreement of Idlib, this gives the SAA plenty of time to rest, regroup, and receive supplies needed for future campaigns.

    The current truce is a strategic pause that has all the appearance of what has happened in the past in the provinces of Homs and Aleppo. The need to free Idlib from terrorists goes hand in hand with the promise of Assad and the government of Damascus to liberate every inch of Syria from terrorists. The diplomatic efforts of Moscow serve to prepare the ground for what will happen in the coming months, with the SAA set to advance on Idlib. In this sense, the deployment of advanced systems in Syria serves as a deterrent against possible responses from countries like Israel and the United States, anxious to defend their jihadists, but continuing to have minimal influence on the ground.

    Russia and Syria’s moves therefore seem to be in preparation for the battle for Idlib, to be the longest and most difficult yet. The liberation of the province is inevitable but requires all the necessary political, diplomatic and military preparation in order to ensure success and limit potential escalation. As is often the case, Moscow and her allies approach complex issues with simple and pragmatic solutions, even offering exit strategies to their (geo)political opponents, which contrasts with Washington’s demonstrated tendency to rush heedlessly towards war.

  • "We Are Ready To Fight Tonight": Pentagon Releases Video Of Massive F-35 Combat Drill

    Considering all the money the US government spent on the F-35, it makes sense the Air Force would want to show them off.

    To that end, the Pentagon has released a video taken by the US Air Force of a drill involving F-35s from the 419th and 388th Fighter Wings. It starts with the jets lined up in formation at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah before taking off in rapid succession at intervals of about 20 to 40 seconds.

    According to RT, the drill was intended to demonstrate “the readiness and lethality” that the US Air Force could bring to bear by deploying the jets against air and ground targets.

    The leader of one of the fighter squadrons brought this point home in a brief comment to the media.

    “We are ready to fight tonight,” Major Caleb Guthmann of the 34th Fighter Squadron said.

    The production of the F-35 was famously plagued by delays, design flaws, and cost overruns. In one of his first controversial tweets after winning the 2016 election, President Trump complained about the “tremendous cost” of the jets.

    In response, Lockheed Martin agreed to cut their price.

  • Ten Reasons Why Governments Fail

    Authored by Anthony Mueller via The Mises Institute,

    When politicians and bureaucrats fail to deliver what they promise – which happens a lot – we’re often told that the problem can be solved if only we get the right people to run the government instead.

    We’re told that the old crop of government agents were trying hard enough. Or that they didn’t have the right intentions. While it’s true that there are plenty of incompetent and ill-intentioned people in government, we can’t always blame the people involved. Often, the likelihood of failure is simply built in to the institution of government itself. In other words, politicians and bureaucrats don’t succeed because they can’t succeed. The very nature of government administration is weighted against success. 

    Here are ten reasons why:

    I. Knowledge

    Government policies suffer from the pretense of knowledge . In order to perform a successful market intervention, politicians need to know more than they can. Market knowledge is not centralized, systematic, organized and general, but dispersed, heterogeneous, specific, and individual. Different from a market economy where there are many operators and a constant process of trial and error, the correction of government errors is limited because the government is a monopoly. For the politician, to admit an error is often worse than sticking with a wrong decision – even against own insight.

    II. Information Asymmetries

    While there are also information asymmetries in the market, for example between the insurer and the insured, or between the seller of a used car and its buyer, the information asymmetry is more profound in the public sector than in the private economy. While there are, for example, several insurance companies and many car dealers, there is only one government. The politicians as the representatives of the state have no skin in the game and because they are not stakeholders, they will not spend much efforts to investigate and avoid information asymmetries. On the contrary, politicians are typically eager to provide funds not to those who need them most but to those who are most relevant in the political power game.

    III. Crowding out of the Private Sector

    Government intervention does not eliminate what seem market deficiencies but creates them by crowding outthe private supply. If there were not a public dominance in the areas of schooling and social assistance, private supply and private charity would fill the gap as it was the case before government usurped these activities. Crowding-out of the private sector through government policies is constantly at work because politicians can get votes by offering additional public services although the public administration will not improve but deteriorate the matter.

    IV. Time Lags

    Government policies suffer from extended lags between diagnosis and effect. The governmental process is concerned with power and has its antenna captures those signals that are relevant for the power game. Only when an issue is sufficiently politicized will it find the attention of the government. After the lag, until an issue finds attention and gets diagnosed, another lag emerges until the authorities have found a consensus on how to tackle the political problem. From there it takes a further time span until the appropriate political means have found the necessary political support. After the measures get implemented, a further time elapses until they show their effects. The lapse of time between the articulation of a problem and the effect is so long that the nature of the problem and its context have changed – often fundamentally. It comes as no surprise that results of state interventions, including monetary policy , do not only deviate from the original goal but may produce the opposite of the intentions.

    V. Rent Seeking and Rent Creation

    Government intervention attracts rent-seekers. Rent seeking is the endeavor of gaining privileges through government policies. In a voter democracy, there is a constant pressure to add new rents to the existing rents in order to gain support and votes. This rent creation expands the number of rent-seekers and over time the distinction between corruption and a decent and legal conduct gets blurred. The more a government gives in to rent-seeking and rent creation, the more the country will fall victim to clientelism, corruption, and the misallocation of resources.

    VI. Logrolling and Vote Trading

    The public choice concept of ‘ logrolling ’ denotes the exchange of favors among the political factions in order to get one’s favored project through by supporting the projects of the other group. This conduct leads to the steady expansion of state activity. Through the ‘quid pro quo’ of the political process, the lawmakers support pieces of legislation of other factions in exchange for obtaining the political support for their own project. This behavior leads to the phenomenon of ‘legislative inflation’, the avalanche of useless, contradictory and detrimental law production.

    VII. Common Good

    The so-called ‘ common good’ is not a well-defined concept. Similar terms, such as that of the ‘public good’, which is defined by non-excludability and non-rivalry, misses the point because it is not the good that is ‘common’ or ‘public’ but its provision when this is deemed more efficient by collective than individual efforts. However, this is the case with all goods and the market itself is a system of providing private goods through cooperative efforts. The market economy is a collective provider of goods as it combines competition with cooperation. Any of the so-called ‘public goods’, which the government supplies, the private sector can also deliver, and cheaper and better as well. In contrast to the state, the cooperation in a market economy includes competition and thus not only economic efficiency but also the incentive to innovate.

    VIII. Regulatory Capture

    The term ‘ regulatory capture ’ denotes a government failure where the regulatory agency does not pursue the original intent of promoting the ‘public interest’ but falls victim to the special interest of those groups, which the agency was set up to regulate. The capture of the regulatory body by private interests means that the agency turns into an instrument to advance the special interests of the group that was targeted for regulation. For that purpose, the special interest group will ask for extra regulation to obtain the state apparatus as an instrument to promote its special interests.

    IX. Short-Sightedness

    The political time horizon is the next election. In the endeavor that the benefits of political action come quickly to their specific clienteles, the politician will favor short-term projects over the long-term even if the former bring only temporary benefits and cost more in the long run than an alternative project where the costs come earlier and the benefits later. Because the provision of public goods by the state severs the link between the bearer of the cost and the immediate beneficiary, the time preference for the demand for the goods that come apparently free of charge by the state is necessarily higher than in the market system.

    X. Rational Ignorance

    It is rational for the individual voter in a mass democracy to remain ignorant about the political issues because the value of the individual’s vote is so small that it makes not much difference for the outcome. The rational voter will vote for those candidates who promise most benefits. Given the small weight of an individual vote in a mass democracy, the rational voter will not spend much time and effort to investigate whether these promises are realistic or in a collision with his other desires. Thus, the political campaigns do not have information and enlightenment as the objective but disinformation and confusion. What counts, in the end, is to get votes. Not the solidity of the program is important but the enthusiasm a candidate can create with his supporters and how much he can degrade, denounce, and humiliate his opponent. As a consequence, election campaigns incite hatred, polarization, and the lust for revenge.

  • China Offers $86,000 Reward For Snitching On Porn

    Incentivizing neighbors to snitch on neighbors, co-workers to snitch on co-workers and family members to snitch on family members has been a hallmark of Communist Rule since the rise of Stalin. Now, the Chinese Communist Party is using these age-old techniques to root out a popular, if illegal, blemish on Chinese society: Pornography. 

    Abacus

    After sentencing a writer of erotic stories to 10 years in prison in a high-profile case, China has doubled the reward for reporting the illegal publishing of pornography to about 600,000 yuan ($86,500), according to Abacus. The regulator in charge of enforcing the policy is called “Clean up the Pornographic, Strike the Illegal”. It will also reward citizens who expose publishing of anything that “endangers ideological security, cultural security, physical and mental health of minors.”

    The National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications – a government body tasked with cleaning up China’s web – last week issued New Measures for Rewarding Reporting on Eradicating Pornography and Illegal Content, which will become effective December 1.

    Given that average Chinese citizens can now earn many multiples of their annual income by ferreting out pornographers, many commenters on Chinese social media websites have speculated about quitting their jobs to become full-time porn bounty hunters.

    “I’m not going to work today,” wrote one potential porn-buster on Weibo. “I’ll look everywhere for materials so I can report anyone who I find disagreeable. There’s money to be made in reporting, so what am I doing working myself to death?”

    Meanwhile, penalties for convicted pornographers, or even businesses and individuals who find themselves connected to the sharing of pornography, can be incredibly stiff (no pun intended).

    How much danger they could be in was illustrated this week with the sentencing of Chinese erotic writer Tianyi to 10.5 years in prison over gay scenes depicted in her novel. The news sparked outrage both inside and outside of China. But she is far from the only one caught in the crackdown that began in early 2018.

    In August, the 27-year-old founder of video app Hot TV was served with a 7-year prison sentence for hosting 1,579 illegal videos on the platform, 28 of which were defined as pornographic – that’s one year in prison for every four indecent videos.

    Even within private online groups, sharing explicit GIFs and videos has become risky, as shown by the case of the WeChat group admin who got 6 months in prison for allowing such content. And that sentence was considered lenient.

    The government is also stepping up raids on publishers, book stores and Internet cafes to try and ferret out illegal content. The upshot: Work is about to get busy for all of those porn identification officers that Chine hired a few years back.

    So keep your impure thoughts to yourself.

     

  • Is This How The World Will Look In 2050?

    Authored by Filip Poutintsev via HackerNoon.com,

    More surveillance

    Digital monitoring becomes cheaper and easier every year, so there is no reason why the governments and corporations will stop watching us unless we they are forced to do so.

    We will most likely see same type of public surveillance and social scoring as they have in China, although it will be far more advanced, and unfortunately we will not be able to do anything to stop it.

    First Libertarian (Anarcho-Capital) government will be born

    The biggest obstacle in creating new free state is the lack of free land. All the land has been divided between governments long time ago, and they are not willing give any of it, even if it’s purchased from them.

    However future technologies will allow people to create artificial islands and other lands masses in terra nullius more cheaply and thus creating place where to settle it’s citizens.

    Another obstacle of creating new country is security and lack of fund to support large army. But due to robotization of military as country of 1000 people (if they have necessary funds) will be able to have high power AI controlled arsenal that will be able to withstand an army of another country.

    Bitcoin will be the main currency of the world

    Some economists say that Bitcoin may take over FIAT after the next global economic crisis, which is predicted to happen in 1–3 years from now. Whether this will actually happen this fast or not, it will surely happen in 10–20 years, and by the year of 2050, people will think of government issued money as something from 20th century socialist era.

    Along with Bitcoin few other crypto currencies that have some concrete advantages will survive, but their total use will be less than 10% of the use of Bitcoin.

    Super AI that will transcend human intelligence will be created

    This is simply a matter of time, as computing power on the machines doubles every 2 years, and by the 2050 (which is 32 years from now) computers will be 30 thousand times faster and smarter than they are today. Smarter than human AI will be probably created much earlier than 2050, and by 2050 the existence of non-human super intelligence will be certain.

    People will achieve biological immortality

    Simply this will mean that with specific medical treatment scientists will be able to prolong healthy human lifespans until eternity. Of course it will not mean that people will stop dying completely as this treatment will probably not be available to the poorest part of world and our bodies will not become indestructible, and therefore people will still die in result of accidents and other physical trauma.

    Radical birth control will be implemented

    Overpopulation is a huge problem, and the only cause of it is too high birth rate. In most Western countries birth rate has already dropped below natural preservation rate (which is 2 children per 2 adults) and will continue to do so. But in developing countries it’s still too high and those countries are alone responsible for the overpopulation problem we have. In the future governments will either limit families in having only 1 child or forcefully sterilize people. Children are not the future, they are the past.

    Robots will take over our jobs

    In couple decades robots will be able to perform all physical tasks that we perform, starting from cutting our hair to serving us at the restaurant and cooking our food. Many jobs are already replaced by robots, so the progress is inevitable.

    When the robots will replace human workforce two things will happen.

    1st: Most people (especially the poorly educated) will be left out of work and without ability to support themselves. This will lead into the birth of large class of poor people, with no ability to reach even the basic standard of life and at the same time it will give birth to even richer group or people who will together own everything. In rich countries the governments may be able to provide basic income for it citizens, but the poor countries will not have the funds for that. Basically unless you are very smart and educated, your only chance of making a living will be through business. That is renting your apartment, self-driving car or assistant robot to someone else, given that you have the funds to purchase it in the first place.

    2nd: The cost of most services and products will be reduced a lot. Currently the biggest portion of the cost of product or service is the cost of labor, as it’s usually the most expensive part. But in the future when machines will do all the work, goods and services will be produced much cheaper. Take for example self-driving taxi. In order to provide taxi services you will no longer have to pay the salary of the driver (which is usually half of the expenses) and therefore the companies will be able to offer rides half of the price.

    Most part of physical interactions will be replaced by interaction with robots

    By the 2050 we will have advanced human-like assistant, servants and sex robots. They will resemble people so much that by interacting with them we will satisfy our social needs. And interacting with robots will be much easier. They will not have their own will (as their sole purpose will be in serving us), they will not have feelings, they will not get angry, annoyed or tired. Therefore they will be perfect companions as we will no longer have to take into account their needs or wishes and compromise with them. Human-to-human interaction will be reduced to minimum as dealing with other people is extremely hard and difficult.

    Most human-to-human interactions will happen in Virtual Reality

    Due to growth and excellence of virtual reality more and more of our daily activities will move into virtual world. We will not only play and watch movies there, but also spend our more and more of our free time there by virtual travelling and meeting people using our avatars. Our lives will resemble the movie Surrogates a lot, with only exception that we will not have secondary physical bodies, they will be purely virtual.

    The popularity of virtual reality will also grow due to the fact that in real life all sort of accidents can happen to you or you can become victim of a crime. While virtual reality will be perfectly safe, at least for your physical body.

    Crossing borders and inter-country travelling will become more difficult.

    Due to the fact of exploding wave of illegal immigration and terrorism, travelling from country to country will get more difficult as many of them, will heavily limit the entry of foreigners. Especially citizens of 3rd world countries will have trouble going to Western World. Some island countries may even go so far that they will limit all travel except air travel, as it easier to control. The world will not get any safer and countries will have to take radical actions to keep unwanted people away.

  • ESPN Loses 2 More Million Subscribers In 2018 

    The collapse of the (politicized) sports bubble is getting more evident, as the devastation in cord-cutting was revealed in Disney’s annual earnings report. It showed ESPN lost 2 million domestic subscribers over the last year, with its base audience decreasing from 88 million in 2017 to 86 million in fiscal 2018.

    The hemorrhaging was not only sports-related, but Disney Channel, Disney Junior, and Disney XD all lost 3 million subs, while Freeform shed about 2 million, said Variety, an American entertainment trade magazine.

    As Variety notes, Disney is among many other media giants experiencing the destructive forces of the cord-cutting trend.

    Nielsen Media Research indicates that cord-cutters are migrating to a virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD), a service that provides multiple television channels through the internet, such as YouTube Live, Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, and Netflix.

    ESPN and Disney have been the barometer of the pay-TV marketplace given their industry-leading status.

    To stem the losses, Disney has a contingency plan in the form of ESPN+, an over-the-top video streaming subscription service that offers live and archived sports streams from regional networks, excluding any local blackouts, for a $5 add-on fee. The extra-service has been a grand slam for the dying media company, attracting nearly one million subs in the first five months. 

    During Disney’s earnings announcement earlier this month, execs told investors some good news: the rate of subscriber declines slowed between 2017 and 2018, to a drop of 2% compared to 3% between 2016 and 2017. 

    * * *

    We recently highlighted that it was not just Disney or most of the large media cable companies that are “cratering”: streaming TV growth has also slowed and recent trends have been ominous. Dish’s Sling TV signed up just 26,000 new subscribers in the third quarter after attracting 41,000 in the previous three months and 91,000 prior to that. In aggregate, the company lost 341,000 customers in the third quarter. DirecTV Now added 49,000 subscribers last quarter after signing up 342,000 customers in the prior three months.

    Sling TV and Direct TV Now have seen subscribers stall in 2018 

    YouTube TV added about 100,000 customers over the past two quarters, after signing up 125,000 in the first quarter of this year. Hulu attracted 175,000 new viewers last quarter after signing up 200,000 in the two quarters prior to that, according to estimates.

    In short: growth has hit a wall, even for these consumer-friendly services. 

    Meanwhile, the “unthinkable” scenario of super-saturation – or simply just more debt-laden Americans on a budget that need to cut back – linger as an obvious explanation for the recent peak in growth.

  • No! Falling Crude Oil Prices Are Not Good For Emerging Markets Like India

    Authored by Ritesh Jain via World Out Of Whack blog,

    Indian media and Portfolio managers always like to spin a bullish story and the current bullishness stems from the collapse in oil price.

    After all, rising oil prices for a country which imports almost all of its oil requirement is bad for discretionary consumption and its currency . Conversely, lower oil prices are good for the Indian economy as trade deficit comes down giving stability to the currency,retail oil prices come down giving breathing space to household budgets.

    But Nedbank breaks this myth and their strategists, Mehul Daya and Neels Heyneke, write…

    “Many market commentators are indicating that it is time to look for a bottom in the relative performance between EMs and DMs.”

    History, as a guide, suggests that EM vs DM performance is still way above the 1988 and 1998 lows ( in short the bottom is far off)

    • EMs underperformed in 2011-15, followed by a risk-on period in 2016-17 after the G20 meeting in February 2016 in Shanghai. Hence the interest in the upcoming G20 meeting to see whether the US and China can come to an agreement on global trade and re-engineer another risk on phase. We believe it will be difficult amid the number of headwinds facing the global economy.

    • The underperformance started in 2011, long before the Trump victory; it is not just about trade, but also about $-Liquidity. As long-time readers know, we believe investors are underestimating the role that $-Liquidity (money supply) plays in risk assets.

    • An agreement between the US and China should boost failing global trade, helping dollar creation and increasing $-Liquidity. This would trigger a setback in the value of the dollar (EURUSD targeting 1.18), providing relief for EM assets in the near term. However, we still believe structural dollar shortages will continue to plague the market in 2019; hence, in the longer term, we remain bearish on EMs. We also remain concerned about China and its dollar debt burden, as Chinese corporates are heavily indebted with cross-border dollar debt. Hence, China cannot afford a stronger dollar or an escalation in the trade war with the US.

    My two cents

    Before you hop on to the boat of EM outperformance vs DM rotation, look at the chart below.

    When dollar liquidity is ample, capital moves to higher yielding EM in search of returns and when the dollar liquidity contracts, the same capital is forced to sell EM assets as dollar rises.

    So pray for a G-20 deal between US and china.

    It might just give you one last bounce in EM assets to get out because after that the door will be shut.

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