- US Army Uses Russian-Style Vehicles In War Drill
The US Army conducted a war exercise last week with Russian-styled air defense systems during Southern Strike 19 at the Shelby Air to Ground Bombing Range, Mississippi.
Southern Strike is a large scale, conventional and special operations field training exercise hosted by the Mississippi National Guard, reported Defence Blog.
The 172d Airlift Wing released a video on Facebook over the weekend showing the Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTAC) from the 148th Air Force Special Operations Command (ASOS) coordinating strikes with Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.
Lt. Col. Edward Knox, Range Control Officer for Camp Shelby, describes how the Army is preparing for a conventional fight against “nation states.”
At the start of the video, Defense-Blog spotted Russian-styled air defense systems, such as Osa and Tor short-range surface-to-air missile systems and BTR-80 wheeled amphibious armored personnel carrier.
Apache pilots are relearning air assault skills that were de-emphasized after the threat of a conventional war diminished at the end of the Cold War.
The Army used styled or real combat Russian vehicles and air defense systems to add extra realism to the war exercise.
While the US military fought terrorists in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia over the last two decades, potential enemies have studied how the US conducts battle. In return, sophisticated weapons, munitions, and disruptive technologies have been acquired by Russia and China.
US forces on the modern battlefield must quickly adapt to these disruptive technologies and prepare for a conventional war, much different than fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Currently, the Pentagon is preparing for a great-power conflict, and on the ground in Europe, where heightened tensions with Russia have many worried that a battle is on the horizon.
- Second-Round Stakes Higher For Trump And Kim
Authored by Patrick Lawrence via ConsortiumNews.com,
President Donald Trump’s announcement late last week that he will meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un next month promises a significant result whether the encounter succeeds or fails. In the intervening weeks, we have two questions to ponder.
No. 1: what will this second summit accomplish? The first Trump–Kim meeting last June in Singapore was about establishing rapport and can by this measure be counted a success. Something of substance, however modest, needs to get done this time.
No. 2, and just as important, will Trump’s foreign policy minders undermine this encounter before it takes place? The record suggests this is a serious possibility.
A month ago, Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. special forces from Syria. The howls of protest, Capitol Hill Democrats often the shrillest, have not ceased. And troops have not started to pack their duffle bags.
But the Syria decision may prove a turning point, given that Trump directly confronted the policy clique – segments of the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, as well as members of the National Security Council – who have been sabotaging his objectives since his first day in office two years ago.
Trump and Kim: Ready to meet again. (Wikimedia)
Steve Bannon, once and briefly Trumps’ strategic adviser, put it this way after the withdrawal announcement: “The apparatus slow-rolled him until he just said enough and did it himself. Not pretty, but at least done.”
Will the second Trump–Kim summit prompt another such showdown with “the apparatus” around Trump?
It could. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, is a hyper-hawk on North Korea. Behind him, the Pentagon finds the prospect of lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula a threat to its immense presence in Northeast Asia. Be wary in coming weeks of vaguely sourced press reports citing newly discovered North Korean treachery, betrayals, and deceits.
More For, Than Against
On balance, however, Trump and Kim appear to have more going for them than against them this time.
Now that the policy cliques and the press have run out of playground epithets for Kim – monster, merciless murderer, and so on – it is generally acknowledged that however autocratic, he is a young but capable statesman. In his new year’s message, he confirmed that national policy has now shifted decisively toward economic development as the North’s top priority.
John Bolton, 2017, at Conservative Political Action Conference, in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore on Flickr)
While Washington and its clerks in the corporate press give Kim no credit, he has already made numerous gestures intended to appease American hawks such as Bolton, build confidence, and signal his desire to be, in effect, a modernizing dictator somewhat in the mold of China’s former leader, the lateDeng Xiaoping.
Kim has halted all nuclear and missile testing, destroyed a nuclear-testing site, offered to pull back artillery from the 38th parallel, which now divides North and South Korea, and returned the remains of some American soldiers killed in the 1950–53 war. North and South have also demilitarized a “truce town.”
Kim wants a deal—there are no serious grounds to question this—and is surely smart enough to know he has to bring something impressive to the table next month. Just what this will be is not clear. It is easier to anticipate what he will not concede: the reciprocal diplomatic process that Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, calls “action for action.” It is the only rational, workable way to go forward after almost seven decades of mutual distrust and animosity.
Development Planning
Moon has remained remarkably energetic in behalf of a North–South settlement. His country, along with Russia and China, have drawn up development plans to connect the North and its neighbors — rails, roads, airports, seaports, power plants, refineries, and so on — that has something for everybody: The North acquires the foundation for a modern economy, South Korea gains land routes to Chinese, Russian, and European markets, Russia develops its Far East, and China can do more business with both North and South.
A map of this plan shows three development belts: Two are to run down the Korean Peninsula’s western and eastern coastlines from the Chinese and Russian borders respectively. The third will run west to east across the 38th parallel. Moon wants these links eventually to connect South Korea to the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Trans-Siberian Express at Novosibirsk stop. (Vera & Jean-Christophe on Flickr)
The numbers bandied about are extraordinary. While Seoul has allocated a modest $260 million to improve cross-border rail links this year, that is merely the beginning. The Korea Rail Network Authority, a government agency, estimates that upgrading the North’s roads and rails alone will cost roughly $38 billion before it is done. At the time of the first Trump–Kim summit, Citicorp put the cost of rebuilding all of the North’s infrastructure at $63 billion.
These plans have advanced steadily since the first Trump–Kim meeting. But coverage in the mainstream American press is far from abundant.
By all appearances, the U.S. is simply not interested in a constructive settlement in Northeast Asia, even as other nations proceed to develop one. This is a perfect illustration of what happens when a nation is intent only on the projection of its power.
It is anyone’s guess what Trump will bring to his summit with Kim. But it is clear what would produce a breakthrough if Trump truly wants one. First, he can exempt some of Moon’s cross-border development plans from sanctions that now inhibit them. Second, he can relax the ridiculous demand that the North completes its denuclearization before Washington concedes anything. “Give us all we want and then we negotiate” is not a position from which to expect any gains.
Given Kim’s aspirations and the diplomatic efforts of Seoul, Moscow, and Beijing, the opportunity for a settlement of the Korean question has not been this promising since the 1953 armistice. At the same time, Washington has rarely been so uncertain of its power—and hence so eager to display it—and we have a president surrounded by advisors given to neutralizing his better policy objectives.
If Trump and Kim get something done a month from now, we could be on the way to peace in Northeast Asia after 66 years of high tension. If they fail, or if Trump gets the Syria treatment, many years are likely to pass before a moment this propitious comes again.
- Photos Emerge Of New Anti-Drone Weapon On Deck Of USS Kearsarge
It should be no secret that the Pentagon is starting to worry about commercial drones posing a significant risk to personnel and military interests.
One area of concern is the proliferation of inexpensive drones could be used to produce one-way flying bombs. After years of dragging its feet, the US military has realized just how complex and disturbing the drone threat is thanks to the fighting in Syria.
Now, new anti-drone defense weapons are hitting the modern battlefield to combat these menacing unmanned aircraft.
One of those is the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or LMADIS, and it is comprised of two MRZR vehicles, a command unit and a sensor vehicle packed with antennas.
The LMADIS can detect, track, identify and even use an electronic warfare weapon to take out enemy drones.
The MRZR counter drone system is currently deployed with the Marine Corps where it was recently spotted on the flight deck of an amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge as it transit through the Suez Canal, providing a much-needed short range defense for the vessel, reported The Drive.
It is hard to believe that a vessel like Kearsarge, which has four layers of air defense weapons, needs the MRZR counter drone system to detect, classify, and fend-off weaponized drones that can be bought on Amazon. But it is due to the environment of a large capital ship transiting through the narrow Suez Canal, which alongside has regions known for harboring terror organizations.
With this in mind, the LMADIS makes perfect sense, and it likely suggests that similar anti-drone systems could soon become integrated on US Navy ships.
LMADIS consists of the RADA RPS-42 hemispheric air surveillance AESA radar system mounted atop a MRZR dune buggy. The short-range S-band radar is highly sensitive and can spot different types of targets including helicopters and aircraft, as well as small radar signatures like light aircraft and small drones.
If the target is deemed unfriendly, a radar jammer can break the communication link between the drone and its controller on the ground.
It is not clear how much information LMADIS can share with the vessel’s air defense system.
But for now, the radar jammer and Stinger shoulder-fired missiles are what the Marines are working with to combat enemy drones.
These systems are part of an expanded ecosystem of weapons that aim to revitalize the US military’s waning short-range air defense capabilities.
In the meantime, strapping MRZR counter drone systems on the flight decks of an aircraft carrier seems to be the short term solution to combat weaponized unmanned vehicles.
- Big Tech Merging With Big Brother Is A Big Problem
Authored by David Samuels, Excerpted from Wired.com,
A FRIEND OF mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.
WHEN HE OFFERED to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.
China’s social rating system, which was announced by the ruling Communist Party in 2014, will soon be a fact of life for many more Chinese.
By 2020, if the Party’s plan holds, every footstep, keystroke, like, dislike, social media contact, and posting tracked by the state will affect one’s social rating.
Personal “creditworthiness” or “trustworthiness” points will be used to reward and punish individuals and companies by granting or denying them access to public services like health care, travel, and employment, according to a plan released last year by the municipal government of Beijing. High-scoring individuals will find themselves in a “green channel,” where they can more easily access social opportunities, while those who take actions that are disapproved of by the state will be “unable to move a step.”
Big Brother is an emerging reality in China. Yet in the West, at least, the threat of government surveillance systems being integrated with the existing corporate surveillance capacities of big-data companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon into one gigantic all-seeing eye appears to trouble very few people—even as countries like Venezuela have been quick to copy the Chinese model.
Still, it can’t happen here, right? We are iPhone owners and Amazon Prime members, not vassals of a one-party state. We are canny consumers who know that Facebook is tracking our interactions and Google is selling us stuff.
Yet it seems to me there is little reason to imagine that the people who run large technology companies have any vested interest in allowing pre-digital folkways to interfere with their 21st-century engineering and business models, any more than 19th-century robber barons showed any particular regard for laws or people that got in the way of their railroads and steel trusts.
Nor is there much reason to imagine that the technologists who run our giant consumer-data monopolies have any better idea of the future they’re building than the rest of us do.
Facebook, Google, and other big-data monopolists already hoover up behavioral markers and cues on a scale and with a frequency that few of us understand. They then analyze, package, and sell that data to their partners.
A glimpse into the inner workings of the global trade in personal data was provided in early December in a 250-page report released by a British parliamentary committee that included hundreds of emails between high-level Facebook executives. Among other things, it showed how the company engineered sneaky ways to obtain continually updated SMS and call data from Android phones. In response, Facebook claimed that users must “opt-in” for the company to gain access to their texts and calls.
The machines and systems that the techno-monopolists have built are changing us faster than they or we understand. The scale of this change is so vast and systemic that we simple humans can’t do the math—perhaps in part because of the way that incessant smartphone use has affected our ability to pay attention to anything longer than 140 or 280 characters.
As the idea of a “right to privacy,” for example, starts to seem hopelessly old-fashioned and impractical in the face of ever-more-invasive data systems—whose eyes and ears, i.e., our smartphones, follow us everywhere—so has our belief that other individual rights, like freedom of speech, are somehow sacred.
Being wired together with billions of other humans in vast networks mediated by thinking machines is not an experience that humans have enjoyed before. The best guides we have to this emerging reality may be failed 20th-century totalitarian experiments and science fiction. More on that a little later.
The speed at which individual-rights-and-privacy-based social arrangements collapse is likely to depend on how fast Big Tech and the American national security apparatus consummate a relationship that has been growing ever closer for the past decade. While US surveillance agencies do not have regular real-time access to the gigantic amounts of data collected by the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon—as far as we know, anyway—there is both anecdotal and hard evidence to suggest that the once-distant planets of consumer Big Tech and American surveillance agencies are fast merging into a single corporate-bureaucratic life-world, whose potential for tracking, sorting, gas-lighting, manipulating, and censoring citizens may result in a softer version of China’s Big Brother.
These troubling trends are accelerating in part because Big Tech is increasingly beholden to Washington, which has little incentive to kill the golden goose that is filling its tax and political coffers. One of the leading corporate spenders on lobbying services in Washington, DC, in 2017 was Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, spent more than $18 million. Lobbying Congress and government helps tech companies like Google win large government contracts. Perhaps more importantly, it serves as a shield against attempts to regulate their wildly lucrative businesses.
If anything, measuring the flood of tech dollars pouring into Washington, DC, law firms, lobbying outfits, and think tanks radically understates Big Tech’s influence inside the Beltway. By buying The Washington Post, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took direct control of Washington’s hometown newspaper. In locating one of Amazon’s two new headquarters in nearby Northern Virginia, Bezos made the company a major employer in the area—with 25,000 jobs to offer.
Who will get those jobs? Last year, Amazon Web Services announced the opening of the new AWS Secret Region, the result of a 10-year, $600 million contract the company won from the CIA in 2014. This made Amazon the sole provider of cloud services across “the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret,” according to an Amazon corporate press release.
Once the CIA’s Amazon-administered self-contained servers were up and running, the NSA was quick to follow suit, announcing its own integrated big-data project. Last year the agency moved most of its data into a new classified computing environment known as the Intelligence Community GovCloud, an integrated “big data fusion environment,” as the news site NextGov described it, that allows government analysts to “connect the dots” across all available data sources, whether classified or not.
The creation of IC GovCloud should send a chill up the spine of anyone who understands how powerful these systems can be and how inherently resistant they are to traditional forms of oversight, whose own track record can be charitably described as poor.
Amazon’s IC GovCloud was quickly countered by Microsoft’s secure version of its Azure Government cloud service, tailored for the use of 17 US intelligence agencies. Amazon and Microsoft are both expected to be major bidders for the Pentagon’s secure cloud system, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative—JEDI—a winner-take-all contract that will likely be worth at least $10 billion.
With so many pots of gold waiting at the end of the Washington, DC, rainbow, it seems like a small matter for tech companies to turn over our personal data—which legally speaking, is actually their data—to the spy agencies that guarantee their profits. This is the threat that is now emerging in plain sight. It is something we should reckon with now, before it’s too late.
IN FACT, BIG tech and the surveillance agencies are already partners…
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THE FLIP SIDE of that paranoid vision of an evolving American surveillance state is the dream that the new systems of analyzing and distributing information may be forces for good, not evil. What if Google helped the CIA develop a system that helped filter out fake news, say, or a new Facebook algorithm helped the FBI identify potential school shooters before they massacred their classmates? If human beings are rational calculating engines, won’t filtering the information we receive lead to better decisions and make us better people?
Such fond hopes have a long history. Progressive techno-optimism goes back to the origins of the computer itself, in the correspondence between Charles Babbage, the 19th-century English inventor who imagined the “difference engine”—the first theoretical model for modern computers—and Ada Lovelace, the brilliant futurist and daughter of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron.
“The Analytical Engine,” Lovelace wrote, in one of her notes on Babbage’s work, “might act upon other things besides number, where objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
This is a pretty good description of the principles of digitizing sound; it also eerily prefigures and predicts the extent to which so much of our personal information, even stuff we perceive of as having distinct natural properties, could be converted to zeros and ones.
The Victorian techno-optimists who first envisioned the digital landscape we now inhabit imagined that thinking machines would be a force for harmony, rather than evil, capable of creating beautiful music and finding expressions for “fundamental relations” of any kind according to a strictly mathematical calculus.
The idea that social engineering could help produce a more efficient and equitable society was echoed by early 20th-century American progressives. Unlike 19th- and early 20th-century European socialists, who championed the organic strength of local communities, early 20th-century American progressives like Herbert Croly and John Dewey put their faith in the rise of a new class of educated scientist-priests who would re-engineer society from the top down according to a strict utilitarian calculus.
The lineage of these progressives—who are not identical with the “progressive” faction of today’s Democratic Party—runs from Woodrow Wilson to champions of New Deal bureaucracy like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes. The 2008 election of Barack Obama, a well-credentialed technocrat who identified very strongly with the character of Spock from Star Trek, gave the old-time scientistic-progressive religion new currency on the left and ushered in a cozy relationship between the Democratic Party and billionaire techno-monopolists who had formerly fashioned themselves as government-skeptical libertarians.
“Amazon does great things for huge amounts of people,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told Kara Swisher of Recode in a recent interview, in which he also made approving pronouncements about Facebook and Google. “I go to my small tech companies and say, ‘How does Google treat you in New York?’ A lot of them say, ‘Much more fairly than we would have thought.’”
Big Tech companies and executives are happy to return the favor by donating to their progressive friends, including Schumer.
But the cozy relationship between mainstream Democrats and Silicon Valley hit a large-sized bump in November 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton—in part through his mastery of social media platforms like Twitter. Blaming the election result on Russian bots or secret deals with Putin betrayed a shock that what the left had regarded as their cultural property had been turned against them by a right-wing populist whose authoritarian leanings inspired fear and loathing among both the technocratic elite and the Democratic party base.
Yet in the right hands, progressives continued to muse, information monopolies might be powerful tools for re-wiring societies malformed by racism, sexism, and transphobia. Thinking machines can be taught to filter out bad information and socially negative thoughts. Good algorithms, as opposed to whatever Google and Facebook are currently using, could censor neo-Nazis, purveyors of hate speech, Russian bots, and transphobes while discouraging voters from electing more Trumps.
The crowdsourced wisdom of platforms like Twitter, powered by circles of mutually credentialing blue-checked “experts,” might mobilize a collective will to justice, which could then be enforced on retrograde institutions and individuals. The result might be a better social order, or as data scientist Emily Gorcenski put it, “revolution.”
The dream of centralized control over monopolistic information providers can be put to more prosaic political uses, too—or so politicians confronted by a fractured and tumultuous digital media landscape must hope. In advance of next year’s elections for the European Parliament, which will take place in May, French President Emmanuel Macron signed a deal with Facebook in which officials of his government will meet regularly with Facebook executives to police “hate speech.”
The program, which will continue through the May elections, apparently did little to discourage fuel riots by the “gilets jaunes,” which have set Paris and other French cities ablaze, even as a claim that a change in Facebook’s local news algorithm was responsible for the rioting was quickly picked up by French media figures close to Macron.
At root, the utopian vision of AI-powered information monopolies programmed to advance the cause of social justice makes sense only when you imagine that humans and machines “think” in similar ways. Whether machines can “think,” or—to put it another way, whether people think like machines—is a question that has been hotly debated for the past five centuries. Those debates gave birth to modern liberal societies, whose foundational assumptions and guarantees are now being challenged by the rise of digital culture.
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THE ORIGIN OF the utilitarian social calculus and its foundational account of thinking as a form of computation is social contract theory. Not coincidentally, these accounts evolved during the last time western societies were massively impacted by a revolution in communications technology, namely the introduction of the printing press, which brought both the text of the Bible and the writings of small circles of Italian and German humanists to all of Europe. The spread of printing technologies was accompanied by the proliferation of the simple hand mirror, which allowed even ordinary individuals to gaze at a “true reflection” of their own faces, in much the same way that we use iPhones to take selfies.
Nearly every area of human imagination and endeavor—from science to literature to painting and sculpture to architecture—was radically transformed by the double-meteor-like impact of the printing press and the hand mirror, which together helped give rise to scientific discoveries, great works of art, and new political ideas that continue to shape the way we think, live, and work.
The printing press fractured the monopoly on worldly and spiritual knowledge long held by the Roman Catholic Church, bringing the discoveries of Erasmus and the polemics of Martin Luther to a broad audience and fueling the Protestant Reformation, which held that ordinary believers—individuals, who could read their own Bibles and see their own faces in their own mirrors—might have unmediated contact with God. What was once the province of the few became available to the many, and the old social order that had governed the lives of Europe for the better part of a millennium was largely demolished.
In England, the broad diffusion of printing presses and mirrors led to the bloody and ultimately failed anti-monarchical revolution led by Oliver Cromwell. The Thirty Years’ War, fought between Catholic and Protestant believers and hired armies in Central and Eastern Europe, remains the single most destructive conflict, on a per capita basis, in European history, including the First and Second World Wars.
The information revolution spurred by the advent of digital technologies may turn out to be even more powerful than the Gutenberg revolution; it is also likely to be bloody. Our inability to wrap our minds around a sweeping revolution in the way that information is gathered, analyzed, used, and controlled should scare us. It is in this context that both right- and left-leaning factions of the American elite appear to accept the merger of the US military and intelligence complex with Big Tech as a good thing, even as centralized control over information creates new vulnerabilities for rivals to exploit.
The attempt to subject the American information space to some form of top-down, public-private control was in turn made possible—and perhaps, in the minds of many on both the right and the left, necessary—by the collapse of the 20th-century American institutional press. Only two decades ago, the social and political power of the institutional press was still so great that it was often called “the Fourth Estate”—a meaningful check on the power of government. The term is rarely used anymore, because the monopoly over the printed and spoken word that gave the press its power is now gone.
Why? Because in an age in which every smartphone user has a printing press in their pocket, there is little premium in owning an actual, physical printing press. As a result, the value of “legacy” print brands has plummeted. Where the printed word was once a rare commodity, relative to the sum total of all the words that were written in manuscript form by someone, today nearly all the words that are being written anywhere are available somewhere online. What’s rare, and therefore worth money, are not printed words but fractions of our attention.
The American media market today is dominated by Google and Facebook, large platforms that together control the attention of readers and therefore the lion’s share of online advertising. That’s why Facebook, probably the world’s premier publisher of fake news, was recently worth $426 billion, and Newsweek changed hands in 2010 for $1, and why many once-familiar magazine titles no longer exist in print at all.
The operative, functional difference between today’s media and the American media of two decades ago is not the difference between old-school New York Times reporters and new-media bloggers who churn out opinionated “takes” from their desks. It is the difference between all of those media people, old and new, and programmers and executives at companies like Google and Facebook. A set of key social functions—communicating ideas and information—has been transferred from one set of companies, operating under one set of laws and values, to another, much more powerful set of companies, which operate under different laws and understand themselves in a different way.
According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, information service providers are protected from expensive libel lawsuits and other forms of risk that publishers face. Those protections allowed Google and Facebook to build their businesses at the expense of “old media” publishers, which in turn now find it increasingly difficult to pay for original reporting and writing.
The media once actively promoted and amplified stories that a plurality or majority of Americans could regard as “true.” That has now been replaced by the creation and amplification of extremes. The overwhelming ugliness of our public discourse is not accidental; it is a feature of the game, which is structured and run for the profit of billionaire monopolists, and which encourages addictive use.
The result has been the creation of a socially toxic vacuum at the heart of American democracy, from which information monopolists like Google and Facebook have sucked out all the profit, leaving their users ripe for top-down surveillance, manipulation, and control.
TODAY, THE PRINTING press and the mirror have combined in the iPhone and other personal devices, which are networked together. Ten years from now, thanks to AI, those networks, and the entities that control them—government agencies, private corporations, or a union of both—may take on a life of their own.
Perhaps the best way to foresee how this future may play out is to look back at how some of our most far-sighted science fiction writers have wrestled with the future that is now in front of us.
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Yet even classic 20th-century dystopias like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984 tell us little about the dangers posed to free societies by the fusion of big data, social networks, consumer surveillance, and AI.
Perhaps we are reading the wrong books.
Instead of going back to Orwell for a sense of what a coming dystopia might look like, we might be better off reading We, which was written nearly a century ago by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is the diary of state mathematician D-503, whose experience of the highly disruptive emotion of love for I-330, a woman whose combination of black eyes, white skin, and black hair strike him as beautiful. This perception, which is also a feeling, draws him into a conspiracy against the centralized surveillance state.
The Only State, where We takes places, is ruled by a highly advanced mathematics of happiness, administered by a combination of programmers and machines. While love has been eliminated from the Only State as inherently discriminatory and unjust, sex has not. According to the Lex Sexualis, the government sex code, “Each number has a right towards every other number as a sex object.” Citizens, or numbers, are issued ration books of pink sex tickets. Once both numbers sign the ticket, they are permitted to spend a “sex hour” together and lower the shades in their glass apartments.
Zamyatin was prescient in imagining the operation and also the underlying moral and intellectual foundations of an advanced modern surveillance state run by engineers. And if 1984 explored the opposition between happiness and freedom, Zamyatin introduced a third term into the equation, which he believed to be more revolutionary and also more inherently human: beauty. The subjective human perception of beauty, Zamyatin argued, along lines that Liebniz and Searle might approve of, is innately human, and therefore not ultimately reconcilable with the logic of machines or with any utilitarian calculus of justice.
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Against a centralized surveillance state that imposes a motionless and false order and an illusory happiness in the name of a utilitarian calculus of “justice,” Basile concludes, Zamyatin envisages a different utopia: “In fact, only within the ‘here and now’ of beauty may the equation of happiness be considered fully verified.” Human beings will never stop seeking beauty, Zamyatin insists, because they are human. They will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder their desires according to the logic of machines.
A national or global surveillance network that uses beneficent algorithms to reshape human thoughts and actions in ways that elites believe to be just or beneficial to all mankind is hardly the road to a new Eden. It’s the road to a prison camp. The question now—as in previous such moments—is how long it will take before we admit that the riddle of human existence is not the answer to an equation. It is something that we must each make for ourselves, continually, out of our own materials, in moments whose permanence is only a dream.
Read the full, ominous report here…
- US Defense Report: China Building Two New Stealth Bombers
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently published China Military Power, a report that investigates the core capabilities of China’s military.
A section in DIA’s Military Power examines how China is working on two distinct stealth bomber programs.
“The PLAAF [People’s Liberation Army Air Force] is developing new medium- and long-range stealth bombers to strike regional and global targets,” states the report issued last week. “Stealth technology contin – ues to play a key role in the development of these new bombers, which probably will reach initial operational capability no sooner than 2025. These new bombers will have additional capabilities, with full-spectrum upgrades com – pared with current operational bomber fleets, and will employ many fifth-generation fighter technologies in their design.”
The first, is the Xian H-20, a subsonic stealth bomber design that looks similar to the Rockwell B-1 Lancer.
The second, described by Western intelligence agencies as JH-XX, is a stealth fighter-bomber, which would likely perform missions similar in scope to those of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II and Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.
As this point, the DIA has very limited information on the stealth programs.
An October report showed that the Hong-20, or H-20, was ready for trial flights. The H-20 is widely believed to be a copy of the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.
The Military Power series is an unclassified overview, is designed to educate the public to better understand key challenges and threats to US national security.
“This product and other reports in this series are intended to inform our public, our leaders, the national security community, and partner nations about the challenges we face in the 21st century,” Lt. Gen. Ashley said.
DIA has an extended history of providing comprehensive defense intelligence overviews. Now it seems that intelligence agency is alerting the public that the modernization of China’s military is coming to an inflection point that can no longer be ignored.
- The American Empire Pivots Toward Venezuela
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Many people are coming to quick takes on yesterday’s extraordinary decision by the U.S. government to recognize an unelected opposition leader as interim President of Venezuela based on their view of Maduro and his government. Similar to the emotional responses to those first clips of the Covington students and Nathan Phillips, such superficial opinions feel good and confirm biases, but don’t tell you much about what’s really going on. From my seat, the move by the Trump administration to choose the leader of Venezuela by diktat is just straight up imperial geopolitics. Nothing more, nothing less.
A month ago, I reassessed my geopolitical assumptions in the post, Is U.S. Geopolitical Strategy Experiencing a Monumental Shift? In it, I detailed how U.S. foreign policy seemed to be shifting toward a focus on containing China, which would lead to a far more serious confrontation between the world’s number one and number two economies.
I’ve now seen enough to seriously consider that we may be entering an entirely new geopolitical environment dominated by vastly increased tensions between the U.S. and China. If so, it will likely last a lot longer than you think as leaders in both China in the U.S. will be looking for a scapegoat as their crony, financialized economies struggle under unpayable debt and unimaginable levels of corruption.
With the attempt to push Russia back in Syria a clear failure, the neocons in Trump’s administration quickly got to work on their next scheme. Enter Venezuela.
Venezuela. Wow this story really has it all.
Bad guy with a mustache, oil reserves, a Russian ally, gold.
Just another act in the desperate attempt to preserve a uni-polar empire.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 24, 2019
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I’ll get to all that in a bit, but first let’s discuss how this relates to the increased tensions with China. As reported by The Guardian earlier today:
Venezuela has been one of Beijing’s closest allies in Latin America, and the largest recipient of Chinese financing, taking as much as £38bn in loans by 2017. China is Venezuela’s largest creditor, prompting concerns that as Venezuela’s economy spirals, state assets could fall into Chinese hands, as was the case with Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port.
It is in Beijing’s interest to support Maduro, given that a new government could refuse to honour Venezuela’s debt obligations to China. Maduro met China’s president, Xi Jinping, last year and toured Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Beijing, and the countries agreed on £3.8bn in loans and more than 20 bilateral agreements.
Of course, Russia is also a close ally of Maduro:
Russia’s Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone with Maduro and offered him strong support in a political crisis he said had been “provoked from abroad”, a Kremlin statement said. “Destructive interference from abroad blatantly violates basic norms of international law,” Putin was quoted as saying…
Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, described the US support for Guaidó as a “quasi-coup” and accused the US of hypocrisy, asking rhetorically how Americans would react if the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, declared herself president.
Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said a US military intervention in Venezuela would be catastrophic.
Russia is an important source of financial support to the Venezuelan government, providing billions of dollars in loans, some as pre-payment for future deliveries of oil. Last month Russia dispatched two nuclear-capable Tu-160 bombers to the country in a further show of support.
Once you start getting all these facts, it becomes clear the U.S. isn’t trying to help Venezuelans achieve “freedom and democracy,” but the goal is to push back against the empire’s primary geopolitical rivals who have been busy working on creating a multi-polar world order.
Let me be blunt.
If Maduro was a good client state of the U.S. instead of allied with Russia and China, not only would the U.S. government not be doing anything, it would actively be helping him.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 24, 2019
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The next question to ask is why does Venezuela matter to Russia, China or anyone else? Well, natural resources of course. Many of you have probably seen it thrown around that Venezuela has the largest proved oil reserves in the world, and this is indeed correct. Much of it is heavy oil, which is far more expensive and labor intensive to extract, but there’s an enormous amount of energy production potential sitting there in Venezuela.
As I was researching this piece, I turned to a data source I once poured over for hours at a time back when I was an oil analyst, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Here are a couple of relevant charts to see what’s at stake in Venezuela.
Then there’s the gold part of the saga, which is equally fascinating.
In case you forgot, Hugo Chavez didn’t make any friends in the empire back in 2011 when he repatriated around 160 tonnes of gold from banks in the United States and Europe. But the story doesn’t end there. As Reuters reports:
The government of Nicolas Maduro has since last year been seeking to repatriate about $550 million in gold from the Bank of England on fears it could be caught up in international sanctions on the country.
Its holdings at the bank more than doubled in December to 31 tonnes, or around $1.3 billion, after Venezuela returned funds it had borrowed from Deutsche Bank AG through a financing arrangement that uses gold as collateral, known as a swap, one of the sources said.
Venezuela last year started carrying out gold barter operations with Turkey to import food following U.S. sanctions that have made international banks reluctant to handle Venezuelan transactions.
The motivation for paying back the funds from the Deutsche swap was not immediately evident. But redeeming the swap would give Venezuela more gold for barter operations with Turkey…
Calixto Ortega, president of Venezuela’s central bank, met with Bank of England officials in December to discuss repatriating the gold but was unable to convince them, according to sources familiar with the situation.
I don’t think the U.S. takes kindly to using gold for barter, nor do I think the Bank of England is interested in giving the remaining gold back. The Venezuela affair really has it all, and as usual, the real story is far more interesting and complicated that the garbage fed to you by mass media and assorted pundits.
Come to your own conclusions about what’s going on and whether or not you approve of it, but you should always have as much background information as possible.
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- Americans Worth Over $25 Million Are Getting Younger, And Multiplying
The super rich are not only getting richer, they’re also getting younger.
According to a Bloomberg analysis, US investors with $25 million or more have seen their average age drop 11 years since 2014, to 47 years old, even as the average age of people with just $1 million is still 62, a data point that hasn’t changed in years. George Walper Jr., president of the Spectrem Group, who conducted the study, stated that a “vast generational transfer of wealth [is] just beginning.”
While the sample size of the study was small – it looked at only 185 Americans that had net worths higher than $25 million – and was highly unscientific, the findings from the study are consistent with other research that has been performed on the top 0.1%. The study found that more than a third of US wealth is held by those over 65 years old. This data point has not risen in step with the share of elderly Americans in the population, according to University of California Berkeley economists who examined the same data in 2016.
The paper concluded simply that the wealthiest Americans are getting younger.
So where are these nouveau riches coming from? The new money seems to be derived from both inheritances as well as self-made fortunes. “There may be more Mark Zuckerbergs at the top of the wealth distribution than in the 1960s, but also more Paris Hiltons,” the economists wrote in the paper.
And the number of US households that have net worths of at least $25 million are up from 84,000 in 2008 to 172,000 this year.
9 out of 10 investors under the age of 38 said that their success came from inheritance and family connections, but the same proportion also attributed their success to hard work and running their own business. About 70% of the richest investors went on record as saying that they are still working.
As more young people enter the top 0.1%, the vast majority of the remaining millennials and Generation X-ers are still struggling. Americans aged 35 to 54 saw their wealth from 2007 to 2016 – most of which was in housing – plunge by more than 41%.
The richest are still using complex estate planning in order to transfer their wealth to their children and future generations. 91% of those who are worth $25 million or more keep assets in a trust, according to the study, and half of those have three or more trusts set up.
Ironiclly, in a world swept by liberal guilt, a major loser along the way of everyone getting richer have been charities – although about 200 of the world’s richest people have signed The Giving Pledge, the study suggested that only 15% of those worth $25 million donate $100,000 or more annually.
- Paradise Lost In America's 'Post-National' World
The Citizen In A Democratic Empire
When most people think of citizenship, they think of their nation’s constitution or the rights guaranteed to them in the law. They will think of their obligations to their country, like paying taxes, obeying the law and defending the nation. In the West, a citizen is pretty much as the dictionary defines it, “a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it.” It is a reciprocal set of obligations in the law, animated by a sense of duty by both the rulers and the ruled.
Additionally, at least in America, citizenship comes with a belief in equality between the people and the office holders. Every American grows up hearing that anyone can be President. The House of Representatives is known as the people’s house, because it was designed to not only represent the people, but be populated by representatives from the people. In other words, the citizens are ruled by their fellow citizens, not strangers or hired men paid by strangers. You can only be a citizen in your nation.
In the post-national world, that old definition of citizen no longer works. In a world where foreign people can just move in, claim the benefits and protections from the government, citizenship loses all value. At the same time, the state is increasingly alien to the people over whom it rules. In the European Union, the people are no longer ruled by their national governments, as all of the big decision are made in Brussels. In America, political offices are increasingly being filled by exotic weirdos with no connection to the natives.
The question then is what does it mean to be a citizen in a democratic empire?
The most obvious thing about the new citizen in the new post-national world is that the relationship between the citizen and the state is transactional. The state looks at the people as assets and liabilities. Theirs is a custodial role. The people that serve the interests of the state are treated differently from the people who depend on the state for their existence. It is a corporate relationship, except that people cannot be fired, so the useless ones will be stashed away while the productive are put to work.
Similarly, the citizen looks at his government in terms of what it can provide to him. He owes the state no more than he owes the coffee shop. The rules promulgated by the state are to be navigated around, rather than respected. If the rules work for the citizen or his group, the law is supported by the citizen or his group. On the other hand, if the law is an obstacle, then the law is subverted or ignored. In a post-national world, respect to the spirit of the law makes no more sense than having loyalty to a country.
This means that patriotism has no role in the democratic empire. Loyalty to your country only works if you actually have a country. The residue of patriotism will last for a while, as people will still think of their neighbors and friends as their countrymen, but in time, as those people are replaced by strangers, patriotism will disappear. In a transactional world populated by stranglers, your primary loyalty cannot be to the state, as it is just as much a stranger to you as the new neighbors, who just moved in from over the horizon.
The sterile transactionalism is already evident. Consider the change in relationship between employers and their workers. Everywhere in America, employment is at-will, which means an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason. Further, local business is atrophying as global enterprise monopolizes the marketplace. It used to be local business was a part of every community, sponsoring little leagues and charity drives. You’ll never see your kid’s little league sponsored by Google or Amazon.
Of course, this will have unforeseen consequences. For example, the military will no longer be able to rely on patriotism for recruitment. Since no one is a citizen in the old sense, the military stops being a citizen military. Instead, it takes on the characteristics of a mercenary army. The decision to join is no different than the decision to take one job over another. This will also apply to the police. The cops will no longer be citizens protecting and serving their community. They become free range prison guards.
Humans are social animals so the loss of national and regional identity means something will replace it. In a transactional world where everyone is a civic stranger, the old fashioned loyalties will become more important. Family, community, and tribe will be the only identities that have meaning. Again, we see the beginnings of this with the administrative layer of the managerial class. Those FBI agents plotting to overturn the 2016 elections were motivated by the emerging new identity politics.
That’s the thing that gets overstated in discussion of identity politics. The old identities will surely play a role, like race, ethnicity, and religion. New tribes resulting from the post-national relationships will emerge. The managerial state will begin to fracture and balkanize, as the rival power centers begin to jockey for power. Again, this can be seen in the obstruction of the Trump agenda by career bureaucrats in the government. They have become their own tribe and they have become class aware.
This paradise comes with a cost. Nations hold together for the same reason communities hold together. The social capital, those invisible bonds between people, breathe life into the organizing structure. Patriotism and civic duty are what animate the republic. Duty to king and the people is what animates a monarchy. This social capital is what binds the rulers to the ruled. In a highly transactional world, where social capital has been monetized or pushed to the margins, something else must animate the system.
That something else must be force driven by the self-interest of the people occupying positions in the power centers. We see some of that with the censorship campaigns by the tech giants and banks. This will become more overt until everyone has a natural hostility to everyone outside their social group. The cost of maintaining order will increase, but the means for imposing order will increase the cost of imposing that order. The empire will have no choice but to become more ruthless in its dealings.
If one wants to a preview of the post-national world, look at Lebanon. Every hill and every valley is its own nation, so to speak. Groups of the same religious sect or political persuasion can form temporary alliances, but Lebanon is not a coherent country with a common purpose. It’s just a place on the map with meaning only to those completely removed from the realities of Lebanese life. The future citizens will be highly local and covetous of the small benefits he and his group can extract from the whole.
- Clinton's 2016 Strategy Revealed: Overwhelm FBI With Trump-Russia Narrative Until Something Stuck
As it became clear during the 2016 US election that Donald Trump had a mountain of support underneath him, nervous Democrats connected to the Hillary Clinton camp reached out to US officials over a half-dozen times, “each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands,” according to The Hill‘s John Solomon, citing internal documents and testimonies he has reviewed, along with interviews Solomon conducted.
Each contact by a Clinton crony was unsolicited, according to Solomon’s FBI sources, in what they described as a “classic case of information saturation” meant to inject toxic and unverified opposition research into the agency’s counterintelligence apparatus that should have known better than to eventually bite.
Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day. –The Hill
Perkins Coie, as we know, paid Fusion GPS to produce opposition research assembled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele in his now infamous “Steele Dossier,” which suggested that Donald Trump colluded with Moscow during the 2016 election.
By the time Perkins attorney Sussman reached out to the FBI’s James Baker, the Steele dossier had already made its way inside the FBI. Sussman, however, “augmented it with cyber evidence that he claimed showed a further connection between the GOP campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin,” according to Solomon. Some of this digital evidence was delivered on a thumb drive, according to Baker.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified. “I referred this to investigators, and I believe they made a record of it,” he added, telling his colleagues to “Please come get this.”
Baker acknowledged that the Clinton-linked attorney’s evidence did not follow the typical route into the FBI – but since he was the bureau’s top attorney, agents snapped-to and collected it from him.
Rewinding to Steele’s first outreach
According to Solomon, “the tsunami began when former MI6 agent Steele first approached an FBI supervisor, his handler in an earlier criminal case, in London” on July 5, 2016 – the same day that former FBI Director James Comey made the shock announcement that he would not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified emails on her homebrew server.
Steele’s approach was not initially embraced, however, and the FBI took no action on the dossier according to congressional investigators. Then things escalated…
Steele traveled to Washington later that month where he would reach out to two political contacts who were in positions to influence the FBI; a former State Department official under John Kerry, and former #4 DOJ official Bruce Ohr – who immediately took Steele’s “research” to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Ohr would eventually warn the FBI that Steele’s information was biased opposition research, which the agency ignored.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)
When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.
But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.
(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.) –The Hill
The Australia connection
While Ohr had passed the Clinton-funded Steele dossier to the FBI, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, contacted US officials – who said Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowing that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Downer has a major connection to the Clintons – securing a $25 million donation from the Australian government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s. Between 2006 and 2014, the Clinton FOundation received some $88 million from Australian taxpayers
Alexander Downer, Bill Clinton Downer’s tip on Papadopoulos launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane – the FBI’s counterintelligence operation which employed spies to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
Continuing with the Trump-Russia “saturation campaign” was the September 2016 delivery of more anti-Trump opposition research delivered to Winer and Nuland – the Kerry State Department employees. This time, however, the opposition research was crafted by known Clinton associates Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. This second “dossier” was also sent to the FBI.
All in all – it was a full court press against Trump and his campaign – including an outreach by Christopher Steele to the media which resulted in the FBI severing their relationship with him (despite using his research as the foundation for a FISA spy warrant against Trump campaign aide Carter Page).
By mid-September — less than a month before Election Day — there likely was agitation inside the Clinton machine: After so many overtures to the FBI, there was no visible sign of an investigation.
Simpson and Steele began briefing reporters with the hope of getting the word out. It is taboo for an FBI source such as Steele to talk to the media about his work. Yet, he took the risk, eventually getting fired for it, according to FBI documents.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, testified to Congress that he was clearly aware Simpson’s team was shopping the media. “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” Baker told congressional investigators.
Ohr, through his contacts with Steele and Simpson, also knew the media had been contacted. In handwritten notes from late 2016, Ohr quoted Simpson as saying his outreach to reporters was a “Hail Mary attempt” to sway voters. –The Hill
Congressional push…
Clinton’s opposition research got some congressional assistance when then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid – after having been briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan, sent a letter to the FBI in late October, 2016 “demanding to know if agents were pursuing the evidence,” writes Solomon.
In other words, the Trump-Russia narrative from Team Clinton was promoted through the State Department, Congress, Justice Department and a top Democratic lawyer. And nobody in the FBI – according to what we know, made any efforts to interfere with an obvious attempt at a political hit job.
In another timeline, Hillary Clinton won the election and none of this information would have come to light. That said, it doesn’t seem to matter anyway since there’s clearly a ruling class that’s above the law – whether they win elections or not.
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