Jun 26

Today’s News 26th June 2019

  • Italy's Salvini Calls Blocked Migrant Vessel A 'Pirate Ship'; Tells Berlin And Amsterdam To Take Refugees

    Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called a NGO migrant transportation vessel a “pirate ship,” and suggested that Germany and The Netherlands should split the 43 passengers who were picked up off the coast of Libya, according to Newsweek. 

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    “Does the European Union want to solve the Sea Watch problem? Easy,” Salvini wrote on Facebook, “Dutch ship, German NGO: Half of the immigrants in Amsterdam, the other half in Berlin. And seize the pirate ship.“

    A group of 10 migrants who were among the original contingent of those currently aboard Sea-Watch 3 were allowed to disembark at Lampedusa by Italy for medical reasons back on June 12. Three unaccompanied minors, the youngest of them just 12, remain onboard.

    Salvini argues that his country has taken in too many of the migrants picked up by rescue boats, and that only a fraction are genuinely fleeing war. He had already once refused entry to Sea-Watch 3, only to have the decision overturned by the ECHR in May. Sea-Watch 3 landed at Lampedusa with the 65 migrants it had rescued from a rubber dinghy in the waters off Libya before the ship was impounded for three weeks. It was then released back to the NGO by Italian authorities. –Newsweek

    According to the European Commission, 27,800 refugees have been resettled across Europe between 2015 and 2017 through various EU assistance programs. From 2018 to today, another 32,071 have been resettled – with a target of 50,000 by October of this year. The programs allow people to make the journey into Europe without making the perilous journey byland and sea, as tens of thousands of people have died after boarding ramshackle boats in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean. 

    Italy’s frustration over accepting a flood of migrants is undoubtedly responsible in large part for the election of Salvini – a hard-line nationalist who has taken aggressive measures to stem the tide of migrant boats docking in Italian ports. Salvini has repeatedly called on other European nations to shoulder the burden. 

    According to European Commission spokeswoman Tove Ernst, officials are watching the Sea Watch situation closely. 

    “For the Commission, this situation shows once again that predictable and sustainable solutions are urgently needed in the Mediterranean,” Ernst told Newsweek, adding that the Commission had encouraged EU member states to “agree on temporary arrangements following disembarkation.” 

    “We renew our call on all Member States to facilitate and speed up this crucial work,” Ernst added. “In the meantime, until such arrangements are in place, we also call on Member States to bear the humanitarian imperative in mind and contribute to a swift resolution. Whilst we welcome that Italy has proceeded with the evacuation of a number of persons from Sea-Watch 3 for medical reasons, a solution for the remaining people on board is still needed.” 

    Sea Watch is exhausted

    Newsweek also reports that those aboard Sea-Watch 3 are “struggling in difficult conditions,” while the organization posted a video on Twitter Monday showing a man named Hermann, who says he escaped torture in a Libyan prison and that the group is exhausted. 

    “We cannot hold and longer. We are like in a prison because we are deprived of everything. We cannot do anything. We cannot even walk, go a bit further, because the boat is small and we are plenty. There is no space anymore,” he says. 

    Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s famous quote on killing Libyan leader Mummar Gaddafi is incomplete: 

    “We came, we saw, he died, and then a flood of migrants poured into Europe through a destabilized Libya.” 

    Ghadaffi, of course, promised to stop all of this for a mere €5 billion a year. 

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  • UN Demands Western Countries Take Back Imprisoned ISIS Terrorists

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit.news,

    The United Nations has demanded that western countries take back captured ISIS terrorists who are currently imprisoned in Syria and Iraq.

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    According to U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, the ISIS fighters and their family members, which number around 55,000, “should face fair prosecution or be freed.”

    States “must assume responsibility for their nationals” even if they have committed unspeakable atrocities while engaging in jihad, according to Bachelet.

    A debate about whether to allow so-called ‘ISIS bride’ Shamima Begum to re-enter the UK raged earlier this year.

    While the media largely helped Begum spin the narrative that she made a harmless mistake and was a victim herself, her true activities and beliefs were appalling.

    It was revealed that Begum literally stitched bombs into suicide vests to ensure they exploded when taken off during her time alongside ISIS jihadists in Syria.

    Begum was also a member of the “hisba” enforcement group, which handed out brutal punishments to those found flouting ISIS laws on how to dress and behave. She also pointed an automatic weapon at women in Syria for “wearing brightly colored shoes”.

    Begum also said during interviews that seeing decapitated heads in trash cans didn’t faze her because the victims were “enemies of Islam”.

    Should such individuals really be allowed to return to the west? Yes, according to the UN.

  • Washington Requests Extradition Of Corrupt Chinese Official Arrested In Sweden

    Investors probably cringed when they scanned over a headline Tuesday morning about the US requesting the extradition of a Chinese national from Sweden, given that the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada at the behest of American prosecutors last year is still casting a pall over trade talks.

    But Washington’s decision to request extradition for Qiao Jianjun, the former chief of a government grain storage facility, comes just days after a similar request by Beijing was turned down. Qiao, as it turns out, is one of mainland China’s most wanted fugitives, and is suspected of embezzling millions of dollars, according to the SCMP.

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    Qiao Jianjun

    The court in Stockholm, where Qiao was arrested last year, was unwilling to extradite him to Beijing for humanitarian reasons. Sweden’s top court “made a preliminary decision not to extradite” Qiao to China on Tuesday last week, according to his lawyer, and he was released the next day, but the court has yet to discuss the case with the government in Stockholm.

    American prosecutors first brought money laundering charges against Qiao in 2015 after he moved some of his ill-gotten gains to the US. In the years since, he has become one of China’s most wanted corruption suspects. He has been on the run since November 2011. California prosecutors also indicted him on charges of immigration fraud and international transport of stolen funds.

    “The indictment also alleges that Qiao engaged in fraudulent grain transactions while serving as the grain storehouse director, and Qiao and [his ex-wife] had money transferred out of China, with approximately $500,000 being used to purchase the Newcastle property [in Washington],” according to a 2015 US court document.

    Days after he was released after winning his extradition hearing against Beijing, police issued an order for Qiao’s arrest on Sunday and he was temporarily detained around lunchtime in the Stockholm district of Racksta. He is being held in a prison in the nearby town of Solna. Qiao has been “provisionally arrested” pending a hearing on the extradition request, though no time frame has been given.

    A spokeswoman for Sweden’s home affairs minister confirmed on Monday that a district court would make a preliminary evaluation of the US extradition request and decide whether Qiao should remain in detention.

    But just because Washington appears to have the upper hand with Sweden doesn’t mean Beijing will give up the fight to have Qiao returned to China. Though whether President Trump might seek  to use Qiao as a ‘bargaining chip’ remains to be seen.

  • The Ongoing Restructuring Of The Greater Middle East

    Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins via Off-Guardian.org,

    So, according to the corporate media, and to President Literally Hitler, himself, while America was sleeping last Friday morning, the U.S. Air Force was just minutes away from bombing the bejesus out of some desolate outposts somewhere in the Iranian desert and launching another catastrophic military blunder in the Middle East.

    At approximately 0400 Zulu time, President Hitler and his top advisors (among them, John “the Walrus of Death” Bolton) were gathered in the Pentagon’s War Room, flight paths arcing across the big board. The hotline to Vladimir Putin’s office in St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow had been activated. The full force of the U.S. military was about to be brought to bear upon a package of top-level Iranian targets with no strategic value whatsoever.

    Apparently, “planes were in the air!” It was all so terribly, terribly exciting.

    This awesome demonstration of American resolve was meant to be punishment for the vicious slaughter of an expensive U.S. military drone, which was peacefully invading Iranian airspace, and not at all attempting to provoke the Iranians into blowing it out of the sky with a missile so the U.S. military could “retaliate.”

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    Map showing the 40 military bases the US has been compelled to position around Iran to combat Iranian aggression.

    The military-industrial complex would never dream of doing anything like that, not even to further the destabilization and restructuring of the Greater Middle East that they’ve been systematically carrying out the since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, which … more on that in just a moment.

    Nor did the incursion into Iranian airspace of this non-provacative military drone have anything whatsoever to do with the crippling economic sanctions the U.S.A. has imposed on Iran in order to completely destroy its economy and foment a coup against its leaders, who are allegedly conspiring with Hezbollah and al Qaeda to develop an arsenal of nuclear weapons to launch at Israel and Saudi Arabia, and other peaceful Middle Eastern democracies, and who were possibly responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and, who knows, maybe even the Holocaust!

    Iran, remember, is a “terrorist nation,” which is not playing ball with the “international community,” which is why NATO has it completely surrounded and is flying hundred million dollar military drones up and down its coastline.

    Also, they don’t like homosexuals (i.e., the Iranians, not NATO, of course), and they burn big American flags on television, and are generally Hitlerian in every other way. On top of which, they’re allies of Russia, the fount of all democracy-hating, fascist evil in the world today.

    Which, I don’t know, makes it kind of weird that President Hitler would want to attack them, and destroy their economy with those crippling sanctions.

    I mean, why would Putin allow him to do that? What was the point of brainwashing all those African Americans with those Facebook ads if his Manchurian President Hitler Puppet was just going to let The Walrus of Death and his deep state cronies bomb his allies?

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    Iran callously displaying the butchered remains of the innocent $220million surveillance drone they ruthlessly murdered.

    Honestly, the more I watch of this movie, the less the plot makes sense to me … but, hey, I’m just a political satirist, and not a professional Putin-Naziologist, or a geopolitical analyst, or whatever.

    If I were (i.e., a geopolitical analyst), I guess I might want to take a step back and try to frame last week’s events within a broader historical context, rather than getting all worked up by the manufactured mass hysteria of the moment. If I did that, things might look a bit clearer, albeit somewhat less terribly exciting.

    For example, that destabilization and restructuring of the Greater Middle East I just mentioned above, which has been in progress since the early 1990s, regardless of who was sleeping in the White House.

    The Gulf War, the Iraq War, the “Arab Spring,” Egypt, Libya, Syria, et cetera … if I were a geopolitical analyst, I might be able to discern a pattern there, and possibly even some sort of strategy.

    If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East.

    My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the “catastrophic policy blunders” that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region, not to mention the whole “Global War on Terror,” and what it is currently doing to Syria, and Iran.

    Take a good look at this Smithsonian map of where the U.S.A. is “combating terrorism.”

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    Note how the U.S. military (i.e., global capitalism’s unofficial “enforcer”) has catastrophically blundered its way into more or less every nation depicted.

    Or ask our “allies” in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and so on. OK, you might have to reach them in New York or London, or in the South of France this time of year, but, go ahead, ask them about the horrors they’ve been suffering on account of our “catastrophic blunders.”

    See, according to this crackpot conspiracy theory that I would put forth if I were a geopolitical analyst instead of just a political satirist, there have been no “catastrophic policy blunders,” not for global capitalism.

    The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn’t have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.

    Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years of wars, “strategic” bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been a pointless waste of lives and money … but global capitalism doesn’t care about people or the “sovereign nations” they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful.

    Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for business or not.

    Take a look at that map again.

    What you’re looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the “nation” most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary).

    I know it hurts to accept the fact that “America” is nothing but a simulation projected onto an enormous marketplace … but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S. government and its military serve the interests of the American people?

    If so, go ahead, review the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have benefited Americans … not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working-class Americans, many of whom can’t afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution.

    OK, so I digressed a little.

    The point is, “America” is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more “American” than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running.

    This is what Iran and Syria are up against. This is what Russia is up against. Global capitalism doesn’t want to nuke them, or occupy them. It wants to privatize them, like it is privatizing the rest of the world, like it has already privatized America … according to my crackpot theory, of course.

    But, again, I’m just a political satirist, not a geopolitical analyst. What the hell do I know about anything? Probably, if we just impeach Donald Trump, or The Walrus of Death, or elect Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders, or some other individual, we can put an end to all these catastrophic blunders that America keeps making in the Middle East.

    So forget about my crackpot conspiracy theories, and let’s get back to whatever terribly exciting crisis is unfolding today. Seriously, my brain kind of hurts. I can’t wait to switch on the Internet and find out who’s threatening America at the moment … Russians, Iranians, Venezuelans, anti-Semites, Mexican migrants, Nazis? The possibilities are endless.

    Ready? OK, here we go.

  • ISIS Supporter "Umm Nutella" Faces Life In Prison After Violating Deal With Feds

    A New Jersey-born ISIS supporter who went by the code name “Umm Nutella” to secretly communicate with the terrorist organization faces life in prison after she violated a cooperation agreement with federal authorities, according to the New York Times. 

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    Sinmyah Amera Ceasar, 24, pleaded guilty in 2017 on two federal charges for aiding ISIS and other extremist groups, after she was arrested in November 2016 at JFK International Airport in order to provide material support to the radical Islamic terrorist group.

    Prosecutors alleged recently unsealed court filings that Ceaser violated an agreement not to use social media or make contact with anyone linked to foreign terrorism. 

    “The fbi put me under a different name because they wanted my case too be sealed,” Ceasar told a Taliban-supporting US associate in a Facebook exchange, adding “How the heck we know i was going to arrested out fo no where.” 

    In another exchange with a jihadist supporter, Ceasar wrote “I’m umm nutella,” and “I’m staying on down low.” 

    “Not going to go to prison for nobody anymore,” she added. 

    Ceasar told federal prosecutors that she “associates her use of the name ‘Umm Nutella’ with her support for ISIS, and that if she used the name, it would signify her continued support for the group,” according to the filing in Brooklyn federal court. 

    Ceasar also allegedly exchanged Facebook messages with a person who she told the FBI was associated with United Kingdom-based ISIS supporters linked to terrorist attacks.

    “Be very careful as to who you trust on here especially if they send you any links that maybe incriminating,” the individual posted in June 2018, according to the court papers.

    Ceasar responded on the person’s Facebook page. “Yea that’s true that how I went to prison because some the Muslims were spies 🙁” she wrote, according to prosecutors. –NBC News

    “Umm Nutella” has also been charged with obstruction of justice, and has been remanded to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.  

  • George Orwell's Dystopian Nightmare In China

    Authored by Kelley Beuacar Vlahos via The American Conservative,

    Beijing’s tyranny over its people is fast becoming more terrifying than anything in Nineteen Eighty-Four…

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    It has become fairly cliché to call China’s surveillance state – its artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition, the new “social credit system,” its cultural policing and re-education camps for Uyghur minorities – “something right out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

    But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

    Orwell’s dystopian vision, first published 70 years ago this June, was informed by the fascist and communist movements that triggered worldwide military conflict and the deaths of millions of people during the mid-20th century. But Orwell’s warning went well beyond the wars we knew. It cautioned, noted Erich Fromm in an afterword in the 1961 edition, against the loss of humanity and free thought, and the new, increasingly centralized “managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines.” It showed how that could be used as a tool of totalitarian ambitions.

    China convulsed in revolution during the 1940s; Mao Zedong established the one-party state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. But Orwell, according to Fromm, had his gaze on Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is set in fictional Oceania, one of three of the world’s superstates. Oceania is run by one party, Ingsoc (English Socialism), headquartered in what is left of post-war London. “Big Brother” is the god-like, mustachioed visage serving as the party’s fearsome symbol of absolute authority.

    As rooted as Nineteen Eighty-Four is in Orwell’s own uncertain world, he could not have imagined how his predictions for humankind would morph and metastasize beyond the terrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and into the cyber-authoritarianism we are seeing in Xi Jinping’s China today (still run by the Chinese Communist Party).

    Where the Soviet experiment failed, China’s has evolved more powerfully into a hybrid of state-run capitalism. Control is maintained through coercion and social management. There is no rule of law as it is universally understood, and electionsare compulsory, with all candidates, from the most local to the top, pre-approved by the party. Only sanctioned religious worship is allowed. Private enterprise is only “free” by courtesy. Successfully petitioning the government is nearly impossible, if not dangerous.

    The Internet of course is strictly censored. While one can buy a copy of 1984, any reference comparing it to modern authoritarian governments, especially Maoism, isforbidden. 

    “The Chinese Communist Party does not say ‘war is peace,’ but it does claim to care about ‘democracy,’ while denying space for competing views to be expressed in public,” Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, tells TAC, drawing a line from Orwellian Newspeak to language published in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manifestos.

    Furthermore, he compares the “stamping out of any discussion” about the Tiananmen Square massacre 30 years ago to the “memory hole” through which pages of undesirable history are tossed by worker drones in Ingsoc’s Ministry of Truth. Last year, the CCP announced a takeover of all mass media regulation by China’s Central Propaganda Department. Major broadcasters, in part, will be responsible for “propagating the party’s theories, directions, principles and policies.”

    So it should come as no surprise that  citizens are now pressured to spend more and more time on the “hottest app” in China—“Study the Great Nation”—a bible of sorts highlighting the teachings and goings-on of president Xi Jinping. Individual participation rates are recorded, and those who don’t spend enough time on the mobile app everyday are punished by employers and chastised by school teachers.

    “He is using new media to fortify loyalty toward him,” Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing, told The New York Times.

    Outside observers say say Xi’s consolidation of power within and for the party reflects the need to minimize political and economic rancor at home, and position China as a unified power player abroad. Indeed, the government seems to find new ways to use technology to manifest this power every day. Ironically—and Orwell himself may have never dreamed this—is that thanks to globalism’s successes, much of that technology is coming from us.

    “Certainly the social credit, the total face recognition systems, the concentration camps in China, evoke all the dark imaginings of a 20th century dystopian like Orwell,” Adam Simon, a Los Angeles-based science fiction screenwriter, director and producer, tells TAC.

    “But what is perhaps most pernicious is how many of the Chinese techniques are created and enabled directly and indirectly not by some nefarious ‘communist’ social weapons lab or politburo but by the ‘best of the West’ from London to Silicon Valley.” (Think Microsoft, IBM, Google.)

    Repeated attempts by TAC to reach officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington for comment on this story were unsuccessful.

    All Seeing Eye

    For Winston Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s doomed protagonist, his inner thoughts, a running conversation with himself, were the only thing Big Brother wasn’t watching. Yet.

    The moment he put pen to paper in a secret diary, written just out of sight of the telescreen dual-functioning as a surveillance camera in his London flat, he considered himself “a dead man.” Sadly, he wasn’t far off base.

    In his one-room apartment, there was “no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment” through the telescreen. “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork,” Winston surmised. “It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.”

    Outside, cameras and microphones picked up everything. The Police Patrol, hovering in helicopters, were forever “snooping into people’s windows.” In the Ministry of Truth, the propaganda nerve center at which Winston worked, telescreens served the same purpose—in the cubicle, the canteen, the restrooms.

    In China today, there are more than 200 million cameras and an unknown number of security robots roaming the streets, watching the populace, in public and private spaces. But unlike Oceania, these “telescreens” are equipped with artificial intelligence, including the ability to identify faces and match them with massive amounts of personal data already harvested by the state.

    These cameras are not only used to catch crooks and identify potential terrorists, but to predict when someone may commit a crime, which sounds more like Minority Report than Nineteen Eighty-Four. They also monitor more mundane social transgressions, like public intoxication, jaywalking, or using too much toilet paper. Culprits are publicly shamed, or worse, their social credit score goes down and they’re blacklisted (more on that below).

    Right now, facial recognition is feeding a national database that, according to reports, is striving to identify any one of China’s 1.4 billion people within three seconds. Research firm IHS Markit estimates that about 450 million new cameras will be shipped to the Chinese market by the end of 2020. China certainly has more cameras per person than any other country in the world (though with more than six million cameras, Britain is not far behind).Facial recognition is already creeping into police work in the U.S (some estimate 50 million cameras here), but localities across America are starting to ban its use. There is no such luxury of protest in China.

    In May, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering limits on the ability of Chinese-run Hikvision to buy American components for its video surveillance technology. The report said Hikvision tech already boasts the ability to “track people around the country by their facial features, body characteristics or gait, or to monitor activity considered unusual by officials…”

    While there was no internet, no cloud, no algorithms in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston always feared that his facial expression and body language would seal his doom.

    “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen,” Winston explains. “The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.” Not showing the proper joy when it was warranted, or hate when it was called for, could be punished as a facecrime.

    Not only used at ATMs, facial technology is now deployed by banks in China to gauge whether a person is honest when they are applying for a loan. Ping An, a financial services conglomerate, has developed software for its banks that “can pinpoint 54 brief, involuntary micro-expressions that a face often creates before the brain can control the movements of the face.”

    Because this technology is deployed everywhere—people are now “paying with their face” at a growing number of retail chains and travel stations—the government has access to broader and more complex data streams: where individuals shop, how much debt they carry, where they socialize. Everyone’s story is told with one capture of their face (made easier now, as police in select areas have sunglasses that can call up tons of data on a person on the spot).

    To grasp the full realization of this new technology, one need look no further than how the country’s 11 million minority Muslim Uyghur population is being tracked.

    According to reports, facial recognition is being used to racially profile Uyghurs based on their distinct facial characteristics. Surveillance cameras have been placed in individual homes in Xinjiang, the autonomous region where the biggest concentration of Uyghurs live. There, according to Human Rights Watch, (HRW), an Integrated Joint Operations Platform is being used by police to aggregate “data about people and flags to officials those it deems potentially threatening.” That information includes personal behavior and relationships, the location of personal phones and vehicles, buying habits, and more. All is fed through a database that can both monitor and “predict” threats.

    “[These findings] shed light on how mass surveillance functions in China,” warns HRW. “While Xinjiang’s systems are particularly intrusive, their basic designs are similar to those the police are planning and implementing throughout China.”

    “A Boot Stamping on a Human Face”

    “The innovation now of course is that the technology—above all the algorithms—obviates the need for human collaborators,” says Adam Simon.

    “It’s the driverless-car version of surveillance.”

    Simon is right about how social control will work for China’s massive, sprawling population in the future. But in Xinjiang, “human collaborators” are still at work—“re-educating” an estimated one million Uyghurs who have reportedly disappeared into heavily fortified concentration camps there in the last three years. In addition, a million Chinese nationals have been sent to live with Uyghur families to serve as their cultural minders and as spies for the PRC.

    For its part, the government, which has severely restricted outside access to Xinjiang, has said that its tracking and detention of Uyghurs, as well as its crackdown on their Muslim culture, is a matter of national security and “unity.”

    Since the 9/11 attacks on the United States, critics say the Chinese have used terrorism to justify their repression of the Uyghur population. In 2017, public intellectuals, teachers, and other high-profile Uyghurs began vanishing. Several, it turns out, were convicted of “separatism” and sent to secret prisons. For all others, their whereabouts are a mystery. Reports over the last year indicate that tens of thousands are in the so-called “education conversion centers,” where, according to the few who have made it out, detainees are beaten, brainwashed, and broken. The goal: total “transformation,”much like Winston at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four. After his interrogator O’Brien said that the future was a “boot stamping on a human face—forever,” Winston was sent to torturous “re-education” in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, after which he ultimately “loved Big Brother.”

    “The Chinese government is committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades,” charged Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW, in 2018. The group described wholesale “political indoctrination, collective punishment, restrictions on movement and communications, heightened religious restrictions, and mass surveillance in violation of international human rights law.”

    In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston describes a world in which any transgression against the state’s arbitrary rules or codes of behavior could mean one was “vaporized” or completely “annihilated” from existence. Some were sent to camps. “In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest,” Winston said. “People simply disappeared, always during the night.”

    Kamatürk Yalqun last saw his father, Yalqun Rozi, when he visited his family in Washington in 2015. They later learned that Rozi, chief editor of middle school textbooks in Xinjiang, was sentenced to life in prison by the Chinese government on charges that he was a separatist.

    Kamatürk told TAC that after his disappearance and other editors’ for the school system, the PRC cracked down on all the textbooks. Now they are all written in Chinese, and the students forced to wear Chinese school uniforms—no Muslim dress allowed. In the streets, there is a battle over the dress code, with reports that Chinese authorities are keeping women with hijabs and men with beards off public buses—even detaining them—and cutting women’s skirts if they are too long. People are reportedly arrested for reading Muslim books and praying.

    “[Uyghur culture] is as different as American culture is to Chinese culture,” and the people are understandably resistant, said Kamatürk, standing in front of a life-size photo of his dad, from whom he has had no word. “My father was the harbinger,” he said. “The true number of deaths in the camps, or died immediately after release, is unknown, given the veil of secrecy and fear.”

    When the Chinese government finally broke its silence about the detention centers, officials said they hosted a “vocational education and training program” in which the “students” were treated humanely and “according to the law.”

    “Its purpose is to get rid of the environment and soil that breeds terrorism and religious extremism,” exclaimed Shohrat Zakir, chairman of Xinjiang’s government, in October. He added that while some may “graduate” from “deradicalization” successfully, “the duration, complexity and intensity remain acute, and we must maintain high vigilance.”

    Just as disturbing are the million mostly Han Chinese nationals who have been sent to Xinjiang in three waves since 2014 to assimilate the Uyghurs. The PRC actually calls them “relatives.” A statement in December 2017 called the project “United as One Family.”

    The reality is much darker. These “relatives” are billeted in homes armed with “gifts” of food and appliances and a better understanding of how to behave in the Chinese way. Some live with their “families” for a year or more. They serve as spies, minders, and tutors—in other words, social engineering on a scale not seen since Nazi Germany sent 200,000 Polish children to live with German families to be “Germanized” between 1939 and 1944.

    Family and community are the last line of resistance to the state. “Only China can do this because they have the manpower and they have the will to do it. They are like robots. They do what they are told,” said Turdi Ghoja, a Uyghur expatriate in Washington who has not heard from anyone in his family since late 2017.

    “They [“relatives”] have absolute power, they are terrorizing Uyghurs,” he tells TAC. “In my mind it is even worse than the concentration camps.”

    The last time Ghoja spoke to his brother-in-law, the man was arrested shortly afterward. Ghoja has no idea if there are “relatives” in the home preventing communication, or if his mother and sister have been taken away, too.

    “They know everything you say, they monitor all interactions,” Ghoja said. “Sometimes I feel that not knowing is better. Maybe they are in the camps, maybe they are not. I just keep calling, and no one picks up the phone.”

    Social Credit System

    According to various reports over the last two years, the PRC has rolled out several social credit pilot programs in which individuals and institutions that are deemed “trustworthy” are given positive points, and therefore rewards, while those who transgress lose points. A super-low rating can lead to being “blacklisted,” blocking one’s access to health clinics, private schools, plane and train travel, and jobs.

    “At its core, the system is a tool to control individuals’, companies’ and other entities’ behaviour to conform with the policies, directions and will of the [Chinese Communist Party],” writes Samantha Hoffman, a visiting fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. And government is using all the artificial intelligence described above to do it.

    “It combines big-data analytic techniques with pervasive data collection to achieve that purpose.”

    Some 43 cities are now testing some form of social credit, while a national system is expected to roll out by 2020 to “put people first, broadly shape a thick atmosphere in the entire society that keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,”according to early planning documents.

    Each pilot is different but typically gives an individual 1,000 points to start. Some depend on electronic data streams coming from camera surveillance, banks, and public institutions to take away points for myriad reasons—everything from evading taxes and playing too many video games  to violating traffic laws. On the other hand, giving to charity, donating blood, and paying bills on time help increase points.

    In places like Jiakuang Majia village everything is done with a designated official spending her day checking in on neighbors and filing reports by hand to the state. Every month she tallies up scores on a single sheet and assigns “little red stars and flags” by villagers’ names on public bulletin boards. In the cities, individuals can check scores on their mobile devices.

    Good behavior is rewarded mostly with streamlined services like getting in a faster queue at the hospital, not paying a deposit on rental cars, or better foreign exchange rates. Bad behavior—which can include protesting and petitioning the government—can leave one locked out of public services and social media. According to reports, more than 11 million people have already been prevented from taking flights or high-speed rail (the difference between a three-hour or a 30-hour trip) based on bad social credit scores.

    The government says this is making not only individuals but businesses more trustworthy. Companies on the blacklist, for example, are prevented from bidding on government projects or issuing corporate bonds.

    Meanwhile, private financial companies are developing their own credit regimes outside of the government using the popular QR code payment systems. In China, almost everything is paid for by scanning a barcode via mobile app, like WeChat, Alipay, or Tencent. Individuals can also use QR codes for identification, tracking family and pets, charitable giving, or posting to job boards. Companies are collecting all that info to build profiles and assign scores.

    “What’s troubling is when those private systems link up to the government rankings—which is already happening with some pilots,” says Mareike Ohlberg, research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. “You’ll have sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tencent about data exchanges and including that in assessments of citizens.”

    Surveys indicate that the vast majority of the Chinese people are in favor of this, particularly among the more privileged classes. According to a September 2018 survey by the Mercator Institute, “wealthier, higher educated, urban respondents” viewed it “as an instrument to close institutional and regulatory gaps, leading to more honest and law-abiding behavior in society, and less as an instrument of surveillance.”

    This buy-in ensures it will be self-enforcing and public protest will be at a minimum. So when a government petitioner lost 950 points and plummeted to a “D” rating for supposedly writing too many online letters on behalf of his mother’s long held medical dispute with the state, no one seemed to care. When investigative reporter Liu Hu was blacklisted and completely cut off from travel and social media for the crime of being “dishonest,” only the Western media took notice.

    “Their eyes are blinded and their ears are blocked,” Hu said of his fellow Chinese people.

    “They know little about the world and live in an illusion.”

    In China, technology has created a system of both commercial rewards along with state controls. Most people say the surveillance keeps them safe and the credit system keeps them trustworthy. Perhaps this is where the comparisons to the bleak and relentless “boot in the face” end, and the iron fist in the velvet glove of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) begins, says Adam Simon.

    “(Huxley) probably came closer to pre-visioning the seemingly non-coercive, but ultimately totalitarian technologies that simultaneously watch and entertain, crush and seduce today.”

    Crush seems to be a key word here. In the end, Hoffman says, the government is using societal problems to justify this authoritarian project, even though “[it’s] a state driven program designed to do one thing, to uphold and expand the Chinese Communist Party’s power.”

  • Pilot In Fatal NYC Helicopter Crash Was Lost In Bad Weather, Not Certified To Fly In Clouds

    About two weeks ago we documented the story of a private helicopter that slammed into the roof of a Manhattan high-rise, killing its pilot. Today, a new report from Bloomberg offers insight as to the cause of the accident: the pilot had become lost in the clouds and was trying to return to the East River heliport, where he had just taken off.

    The NTSB said on Tuesday that the pilot radioed the E. 34th St. helicopter landing pad to say he “did not know where he was.” The pilot was reportedly flying erratically after entering thick clouds when the helicopter hit the roof of 787 7th Ave. at a high speed, descending several hundred feet before striking the roof and breaking into small pieces.

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    The pilot was not certified to fly in clouds but had told others that he thought there was a window in the bad weather that would allow him to fly that day.

    The NTSB also said that the route the pilot took was “erratic”. He first flew over the East River before reversing course and then flying north, before flying over Manhattan “zigzagging and changing altitude several times” in an area where helicopters aren’t even supposed to fly.

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    A Central Park weather station confirmed that clouds had “blanketed the city” prior to the incident.

    The helicopter was owned by a corporation that has ties to New York real estate investment firm American Continental Properties LLC. The fire department identified the pilot as Tim McCormack, who died as a result of the accident.

  • Black Markets Show How Socialists Can't Overturn Economic Laws

    Authored by Allen Gindler via The Mises Institute,

    If we consider economics to be an objective science, its rules should also have universal significance and use, despite differences in societal order. However, socialists of the materialist camp are committed to the idea that common ownership of the means of production would change the way economic laws unfold under socialism. Basically, they reject the notion of the universality and objectivity of economic rules by suggesting that the laws would change along with a change to the social formation.

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    Thus, communists adhered to the Marxian idea that socialism would rectify a “surplus value” law, end the “exploitation” of workers, and efficiently regulate the production, distribution, and consumption aspects of the economy. They sought to eliminate the market regulatory mechanism and replace it with directives of the central planning authority. Bolsheviks enthusiastically got down to business: they eradicated private property, collectivized everything and everyone, and implemented an official planned economy.

    Did it effectively turn off market relations as they thought it would?

    No. In contrast to the common perception, socialism has been unable to kill the market economy. The market went underground and turned into a black market. Black markets existed in capitalist countries as well, but they worked underground because they dealt in illegal commodities and services. The black market under socialism served the same purpose, but the list of commodities and services included mostly items of everyday and innocent consumption that people under capitalism could easily purchase in stores. Virtually all groups of personal consumption products found their way to the black market at some time and in some places. Everything from jar lids to toilet paper was subject to black-market relations.

    Despite the proclaimed planned economy, people were engaged in market relations on all levels and trusted more the price of the goods and services that were established by the market and not dictated by the government. The official exchange rate of the ruble to the dollar was 0.66 to 1 in 1980. But nobody except party nomenclature was able to enjoy such a favorable exchange rate. At the same time, the black market offered 4 rubles for 1 American dollar.

    There was no production of jeans in the Soviet Union, but like all their peers abroad, Soviet youth wore jeans. The price was 180–250 rubles for a pair depending on the brand, which was almost twice as much as the monthly wage of an entry-level engineer. A visiting nurse charged 1 ruble for one injection if a patient lived below the fifth floor. The price reached 1.5 rubles for patients who lived on the fifth floor and up. A plumber happily repaired a faucet for just a bottle of vodka.

    Two Prices for Everything

    Therefore, in the Soviet Union, any significant goods had two price tags: one real and another virtual. The state set the first price through some obscure methods; the usual mechanism of supply and demand established the second price on the market. If you were lucky, after several hours of standing in a queue, you could purchase goods at the state price. However, due to the chronic lack of everything for everyone, the same product could be bought on the black market at a much higher price. The virtual price became real on the black market and reflected the actual value of the goods for the buyer. The presence of two price tags is a confirmation of the thesis of Ludwig von Mises regarding the impossibility of economic calculations under socialism. At the same time, this is proof of the immortality and immutability of the economic laws of the free market, even under a totalitarian regime. Therefore, two economic systems and two sets of prices co-exist under socialism.

    People were forced to use the services of the black market, even under the penalty of severe punishment, including up to the death penalty. Almost the entire society was engaged in various corruption schemes to support a certain standard of living. There was a paradoxical situation when the shelves of the supermarkets were empty, but refrigerators at home were more or less full. The black market was filled with smuggled goods from abroad, as well as commodities produced in underground workshops. But more often, everyday products were specifically kept from retail to create a shortage and sell them on the black market at a speculative price. Socialism had undermined the normal flows of production, distribution, and consumption by ignoring the objective laws of economics. Nevertheless, an underground market and the intrinsic entrepreneurial spirit of the people helped them survive the socialist madness.

    Regardless of the proclaimed successes of the Soviet economy reported by Communist party leaders, the socialist economy was unable to compete with its capitalist counterparts. Communists decided to create a system that somehow mimicked the work that a free market had successfully and automatically performed for centuries. Thus, they introduced socialist competition that was supposed to replace free market competition. Surely enough, it was an inadequate and unfortunate replacement. The rewards for winners in the capitalist competition were far higher than for the winners under socialism. For example, the capitalist winner enjoyed a significant increase in well-being.

    Moreover, the principal winner of the free market competition was society as a whole. This is a natural feature of a free market economy and the main reason why the evolution of human societies selected this mode of production. A competition during socialism gave to the winners some publicity, a certificate of honor, maybe a trip to a “sanatorium” (that is, a health spa), and other bagatelles that people usually did not appreciate. But most importantly, society as a whole did not enjoy a significant improvement in well-being.

    People were not sufficiently stimulated and were underpaid, which explained the lower labor productivity compared to capitalist countries. Moreover, this is despite the notion that the means of production, at last, belong to the workers themselves. People had a famous saying that can be considered the quintessence of Soviet-style socialism: “They [the government] pretend to pay, and we pretend to work.”

    Socialism is a set of systems that try to artificially inhibit the free flow of objective economic laws by creating subjective barriers in the form of specific legislation and punitive policies. Socialists mistakenly think that if they assault private property and market relations, the economic laws will also change. They have taken up the task which, in principle, has no rational solution. Nothing good comes from the idea of ignoring or violating the fundamental laws of economics. These laws still exist, regardless of opinions and neglect to recognize their real character and the impossibility of changing them.

    Socialism disrupts the evolutionary process and leads society to a dead end. The desperate economic situation of ordinary folks in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea — the remnants of socialist undertakings — is a direct result of building a society in defiance of the natural action of the fundamental law of economics. As a rule, socialist regimes were buying time by employing slave labor, plunder, coercion, and everything else that an aggressive totalitarian regime could offer. However, in the end, the means of socialistic life support was exhausted, and than returning to the natural and healthy market relations, where the laws of economics work for the benefit of the human race.

    The same laws of market economics have worked in different human societies: from pre-historic to post-industrial, but still socialists continue to entertain the idea of tampering with these forces of nature.

  • Google Ethics Team Busted Calling Prominent Conservative Jews "Nazis": Veritas

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    In a second day of bombshells from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, a leaked document reveals what appears to be members of Google’s “transparency and ethics” group calling prominent Jewish conservatives Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager “Nazis,” along with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who is not Jewish. 

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    The email was leaked to Veritas following their Monday report in which an undercover operative recorded a senior Google employee admitting that the company is manipulating its algorithms ahead of the 2020 election in order to prevent the “next Trump situation.” 

    The email apparently was sent as part of the Google “transparency-and-ethics” group internal communications and suggests that content from PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro should be disabled from the “suggestion feature.” –Project Veritas

    “…if we understand that PragerU, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro et al are nazis using the dog whistles…” reads the email. “I don’t think correctly identifying far-right content is beyond our capabilities. But if it is, why not go with Meredith’s suggestion of disabling the suggestion feature?” 

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    And as Veritas notes, the ‘senior Google executive’ caught on hidden camera yesterday explained in a Medium blog post that “Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings.” 

    “I don’t think correctly identifying far-right content is beyond our capabilities,” would suggest otherwise – along with the sender’s proposed solution of “disabling the suggestion feature.” 

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