- Brazil's Bolsonaro Bans Bic Pens "Because They're French" As Macron Feud Escalates
As one of the most entertaining contemporary diplomatic spats drags on, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (who, like President Trump, is known for his sometimes outrageous commentary) reportedly said Friday that he would no longer use Bic pens to sign official documents “because they’re French.”
The background: Bolsonaro and French President Emmanuel Macron have been feuding since the latter criticized the former over his handling of the wildfire “crisis” in the Amazon. Macron started by accusing Bolsonaro of lying about who caused the wildfires, then Bolsonaro accused Macron of “insulting” him by raising a whopping $25 million from the G-7 to help with wildfire relief. Since then, the two have been regularly exchanging barbs, the AFP reports.
And in the latest round, Bolsonaro said he would stop using pens made by the French company, and use pens made by Brazilian company Compactor instead.
“A pen (of the Brazilian brand) Compactor and no more Bic, will work,” Bolsonaro said.
When asked by reporters whether Bolsonaro was joking, or being serious, the Brazilian government declined to comment.
If Bolsonaro truly does intend to abandon pic, it looks like the joke is on him: Most of the Bic ballpoint pens sold in Brazil are made at a factory in the Brazilian city of Manaus (which is situated in one of the country’s Amazonian regions). Previously, Bolsonaro said he and his government would start using Bic pens, which are cheap and widely used, as part of their plan to cut back on government expenses and waste.
Bic refused to comment on Bolsonaro’s comments (though, in what appears to be a subtle snub of the Brazilian president, the company’s spokesman said Bic felt “flattered” to be recognized as a “democratic” brand).
As for the feud between the two leaders, there’s little hope for detente in sight: Bolsonaro is refusing to speak with Macron unless the French president first apologizes to him for his remarks.
- European Dreams Vs. Mass Migration
Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,
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Unfortunately, the European mindset refuses to face the reality, as if the challenge is too severe to be addressed.
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“The conference took place under the theme ‘Penser l’Europe’ [‘Thinking of Europe’]… There, I was disturbed to hear Tariq Ramadan speaking of Europe as dar al-Shahada, i.e. house of Islamic belief. The attending audience was alarmed, but did not get the message of the perception of Europe… as a part of house of Islam. If Europe is no longer perceived as dar al-Harb/house of war, but viewed as part of the peaceful house of Islam, then this is not a sign of moderation, as some wrongly assume: it is the mindset of an Islamization of Europe”. — Bassam Tibi, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Goettingen.
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It is a false Marxist notion among young people here in Europe that if you are successful or comfortable, it can only have been at the expense of humanity: “If I win, somebody else must lose.” There seems to be no concept at all of “win-win” — “If I win, all of you can win too: everyone can win!” — which underpins the free economy and has lifted so much of the world so spectacularly out of poverty.
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It is important to… reject the current fashion of self-abasement. Europe seems to be afflicted with a skepticism about the future, as if the decline of the West is actually a justified punishment and a liberation from its faults of the past…. “For me, today,” notes Alain Finkielkraut, “the most essential thing is European civilization”.
Europe presents itself as the vanguard of the unification of humanity. Europe’s cultural roots, as a result, have been put at risk. According to Pierre Manent, a renowned French political scientist and a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris:
“European pride or European self-consciousness depend on the rejection of European history and European civilization! We want nothing to do with the Christian roots and we absolutely want to be perfectly welcoming to Islam”.
Manent delivered these words to the French monthly, Causeur. He cited, as an example, Turkey:
“It was very clear that not only was its massively Islamic character (even before Erdogan) not an obstacle but a sort of motive, a reason to bring the Turkey into the EU. It would finally have been the definitive proof that Europe had detached itself and freed itself from its Christian dependence”.
Europe’s southern border is now the front line for this mass-migration; Italy risks becoming that refugee camp. In the last few months, Italy has faced a succession of boats from Africa, challenging its policy: first the Sea Watch 3, then the Open Arms and finally the Ocean Viking. Until just before Italy’s March 2018 elections, migrants were crossing the Mediterranean at the rate of 200,000 a year.
Since European security ministers failed to agree on the Mediterranean refugee crisis, Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, willing to stand virtually alone, chose to close Italian ports. Although Italian court tried to charge him with “kidnapping” migrants, Salvini’s policy worked and landings plummeted. In the first two months of 2019, 262 seaborne migrants reached Italy, compared to 5,200 in the same period last year, and more than 13,000 in the same period of 2017.
The Italian government collapsed on August 20; there is now the great possibility that a new pro-immigration leftist coalition will take its place. A ship attempting to bring to Italy 356 migrants from Africa, more than all who came in the first two months, has been stranded at sea since it picked up the migrants between August 9-12, while awaiting permission to land. In one standoff after another, NGOs have been attempting to break Salvini’s barricade against illegal immigration.
One ship already did. One of the captains of the Sea Watch 3, a German citizen, Pia Klemp, was even honored by the city of Paris for breaking the Italian blockade. According to the other German captain, Carola Rackete: “My life was easy… I am white, German, born in a rich country and with the right passport” — as if her determination to help migrants would be, in her own words, related to the comparatively privileged life she has lived in the West.
It is a false Marxist notion among young people in Europe that if you are successful or comfortable, it can only have been at the expense of humanity: “If I win, somebody else must lose.” There seems to be no concept at all of “win-win” — “If I win, all of you can win too: everyone can win!” — that underpins a free-market economy and has lifted so much of the world so spectacularly out of poverty. Many of the young people see only barriers to be broken down. Pascal Bruckner called it, the “tyranny of guilt“.
Unfortunately, the price for cultural relativism has become painfully visible in Europe. The disintegration of Western nation-states is now a real possibility. Multiculturalism — built on a background of demographic decline, massive de-Christianization and cultural self-repudiation — is nothing more than a transitional phase that risks leading to the fragmentation of the West. Among the reasons for that, the historian David Engels listed “mass-migration, the aging of the population, Islamization and the dissolution of nation states”.
Mass-migration has already undermined the unity and solidarity of Western societies and — combined with demonizing Israel in the hope of obtaining inexpensive oil and preventing terrorism — has destabilized the post-1945 political consensus.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of open doors — “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”) — led to a right-wing party in her parliament. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now leading the polls in regional elections in the former East Germany. The French Socialist Party, which governed the country under President François Hollande, is now disappearing. The diktats of Brussels on immigration and quotas have broken the unity of Europe and resulted in the virtual “secession” of the Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia). The migration utopia in Sweden brought a populist right-wing party into parliament, and the arrival of half a million illegal immigrants pushed the once-marginal League of Matteo Salvini to the top of Italy’s political establishment.
This list does not even include Brexit, the British vote to leave the EU. According to German journalist Jochen Bittner, writing in The New York Times last year:
“In late 2015, the Leave campaign started putting up placards which showed the exodus of refugees from Syria and other countries through the Balkans, and adorned them with slogans like ‘Breaking Point’ and ‘Take Back Control’. With Ms. Merkel declaring an open-door policy, the message hit home for millions of worried Britons and Europeans. Not coincidentally, it was around this time that support for Brexit began to tick up”.
Instead of crying at “populism” and “nationalism” all the time, might Europe rethink its decision?
Currently, the Europe that promised to avoid building more walls after 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, is raising one after another one to defend itself from an unprecedented situation. There is the 15-meter Spanish barrier in Ceuta and Melilla; the Hungarian wall of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; one at Calais in France; an Austrian fence planned at its border with Italy, a fence Slovenia wants to build at its border with Croatia and North Macedonia’s fence for its border with Greece.
Whether one likes it or not, Europe seems to be feeling an existential cultural threat from these great migratory flows. There is not only the pressure of illegal immigration; there is also pressure from legal immigration. More than 100,000 people applied for asylum in France in 2017, a “historic” number, and more than 123,000 applications in 2018. In Germany, there were 200,000 requests for asylum in 2018.
This mass immigration is changing Europe’s internal composition. In Antwerp, the second-largest city in Belgium and the capital of Flanders, half the children in elementary schools are Muslim. In the Brussels region, you can get some idea of the change by studying the attendance of religion classes in primary and secondary schools: 15.6% attend Catholic classes, 4.3% Protestant and Orthodox classes, 0.2% attend Judaism classes, and 51.4% attend Islamic religion classes (12.8% attend secular “ethics” classes). Is it clearer now what will happen in the capital of the European Union? We should not be surprised that immigration tops the list of worries of the Belgian population.
Marseille, the second-largest city in France, is already 25% Muslim. Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands, is 20% Muslim. Birmingham, the second-largest city in Britain, is 27% Muslim. It is estimated that in one generation, a third of the citizens of Vienna will be Muslim. “Sweden is in a situation that no modern country in the West has ever found itself in”, observedChristopher Caldwell. According to the Pew Research Center, Sweden might well be 30% Muslim by 2050; and 21% Muslim in the unlikely event that the flow of immigrants stops altogether. Today, 30% percent of Sweden’s babies have foreign-born mothers. The city of Leicester in the UK is presently 20% Muslim. In Luton, out of 200,000 inhabitants, 50,000 are Muslim. Most of the population growth in France between 2011 and 2016 was driven by the country’s large urban areas. At the top are Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and the Paris area, according to a studypublished by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. In Lyon, there are about 150,000 Muslims out of a population of 400,000. According to one article, 18% of the newborns in France carry a name that is Muslim. During the 1960s, the number was 1%.
In the most extreme scenario, the percentages of Muslims in Europe in 2050 are estimated to be: France (18%), UK (17.2%), Netherlands (15.2%), Belgium (18.2%), Italy (14.1%), Germany (19.7%), Austria (19.9%), Norway (17%). 2050 is just over the horizon. What, then, is to be expected in two or three generations, when the late historian Bernard Lewis said that Europe would, “at the very latest“, be Islamic ?
Unfortunately, the European mindset refuses to face the reality, as if the challenge is too severe to be addressed. “The unstoppable progression of this system makes me think of a tea on board the Titanic”, prominent French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes.
“It is not by turning a blind eye to tragedy that it will be prevented from happening. What will be the face of France in fifty years? What will the cities of Mulhouse, Roubaix, Nantes, Angers, Toulouse, Tarascon, Marseille and the whole Seine Saint-Denis department look like?”
If the population changes, the culture follows. As the author Éric Zemmour points out, “after a certain number, quantity becomes quality”.
While the power of European Christianity seems to be falling off a demographic and cultural cliff, Islam is making giant strides. It is not just a question of immigration and birth rates; it is also one of influence. “In September 2002 I participated in a meeting of the cultural centers of the leading European Union member states in Brussels”, the German-Syrian intellectual Bassam Tibi, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the University of Göttingen, wrote.
“The conference took place under the theme ‘Penser l’Europe’ [‘Thinking of Europe’] while being given the title ‘Islam en Europe’. There, I was disturbed to hear Tariq Ramadan speaking of Europe as dar al-Shahada, i.e. house of Islamic belief. The attending audience was alarmed, but did not get the message of the perception of Europe in an Islamist mindset as a part of house of Islam. If Europe is no longer perceived as dar al-Harb/house of war, but viewed as part of the peaceful house of Islam, then this is not a sign of moderation, as some wrongly assume: it is the mindset of an Islamization of Europe…”
The good news is that nothing is set in stone. Europeans could still decide for themselves how many immigrants their societies need. They could put in place a solution that is coherent rather than chaotic. They could still rediscover their humanistic heritage. They could resume having children and they could launch a real program of integration for the immigrants already in Europe. But none of these steps, necessary to avoid the transformation of large parts of the continent and its falling apart, is taking place.
It is important to listen to Pierre Manent’s prognosis and to reject the current fashion of self-abasement. Europe seems to be afflicted with a skepticism about the future, as if the decline of the West is actually a justified punishment and a liberation from its faults of the past. Yes, many faults may have been terrible, but are they truly so much worse than the faults of many other countries, such as Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, Mauritania, Cuba, Nigeria, Venezuela or Sudan, to name just a few? More important is that at least the West, as opposed to many other places, has tried to correct its faults. Most important is to avoid over-correcting and ending up in a situation worse than before.
“For me, today,” notes Finkielkraut, “the most essential thing is European civilization”.
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- Falling From Grace: The Decline Of The US Empire
Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”
Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.
I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.
As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”
This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.
And it never will.
If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.
But of what importance is this to us today?
Well, today, the US is the world’s undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it’s going through a bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.
Not so, I’m afraid. All empires follow the same cycle. They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant. Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.
This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.
The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.
But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began to expand its government into an all-powerful body.
Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.
So, how does that square with the quote, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed”?
Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.
What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.
The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.
The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful manner.
Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the bully.
If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing that their source of power is gone.
Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they take great pleasure in his defeat.
And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.
A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.
When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.
At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that “no option is off the table.”
The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple as a result.
At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.
History has seen this happen countless times. The “brain drain” occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country, their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.
The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing. At some point in the near future, it’s likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.
The US will be entering into warfare at a time when it’s broke, and this will become apparent suddenly and dramatically. The final decline will occur with alarming speed.
When this happens, the majority of Americans will hope in vain for a reverse of events. They’ll be inclined to hope that, if they collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed,” the world will be forgiving, returning them to their former glory.
But historically, this never occurs. Empires fall with alarming speed, because the support systems that made them possible have decamped and have become reinvigorated elsewhere.
Rather than mourn the loss of empire that’s on the horizon, we’d be better served if we focus instead on those parts of the world that are likely to benefit from this inevitability.
Socialist ideas are becoming increasingly popular in the US. At the same time the US government is printing money hand over fist. All while the US empire continues to overstretch itself across the world.
It’s all shaping up to be a world-class disaster… one unlike anything we’ve seen before.
That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video showing how it all could go down. Click here to watch it now.
- UN Budget: Who Has (And Has Not) Paid Their Dues?
All permanent UN members have made their full regular payments to the intergovernmental body, except the United States. The on-time payment period ends at the end of February, and by that point this year only 17 percent of countries had paid their dues in full. But, as Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, six months later 64 percent of the budget has been paid, meaning that over half of nations still have not paid their dues.
You will find more infographics at Statista
President Trump has routinely complained about the alleged skewed payment of United Nations dues system, where the U.S. pays 22 percent of the overall regular budget.
All member states are legally required to make payments to both the regular budget and the peacekeeping budget, two separate budgets with two different payment calculations. The UN considers gross national income, population, and debt burden when coming up with its operational budget.
Earlier this year, the UN announced cutbacks to the human rights division. The cutbacks are the result of delayed member state payments and the long-term payments nations owe, of which the U.S. owes a hefty portion. As a result, the international body is cutting back on human rights committees, which are designed to oversee adherence to treaties that uphold international laws relating to children’s rights, combat civil and political repression, discrimination against women, torture, and racial discrimination. The human rights office is one of the three pillars of the United Nations, but it receives less than 4 percent of the organization’s budget.
- In Search Of A Russiagate Scalp: The Entrapment Of Maria Butina
Authored by John Kiriakou via ConsortiumNews.com,
In need of a “collusion” connection, top FBI officials have now been shown to be behind the false portrayal of an unregistered lobbyist as a spy…
Much has been written about Maria Butina, the Russian “spy” who was accused of seeking to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and other organizations to try to gain a foothold in the Trump campaign and, later, in the White House. Much of it turned out to be nonsense. Butina wasn’t a spy. She wasn’t charged with spying. She wasn’t accused of being a spy. But that’s how the media branded her. The important thing is that there actually were spies around her. And they weren’t who you might have thought.
In the Butina case, the FBI and the Justice Department needed a scalp in the midst of the frenzy about the ultimaely unproven collusion theory of “Russiagate,” and so Butina was charged and convicted of “conspiracy to fail to register as an agent of a foreign government.”
Seriously. Let me explain what that means. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was passed into law in 1938.
It “requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts, and disbursements in support of those activities.”
The law, the registration, and the database are meant to keep track of foreign lobbyists. Nothing more.
Butina: Unregistered agent falsely portrayed as a spy.
In realistic terms it means this: In 2008, I was hired by the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce to write a series of op-eds in support of doing business in the city. I wrote four op-eds and they paid me a fee. But I had to go to the Justice Department’s FARA website and register as a “foreign agent,” meaning that I was being paid by a foreign government. No problem. It didn’t mean that I was a “secret agent” for Abu Dhabi. It just meant that I was temporarily in the employ of a foreign government.
Washington attorneys and lobbyists do this kind of thing every day. And more often than not, they don’t register, either because they are too busy, they don’t realize that they have to, or they don’t believe, as in the current case ofWashington super lawyer Greg Craig,that they have to. They are very rarely prosecuted.
Anybody can go to the FARA website and do a records search. I did one for the purpose of this article to search for people I know—attorneys, friends, acquaintances—and found many of them taking money from the governments of Libya, Chad, Jordan, Saudi Arabia (lots of them), Greece and other countries. It’s no big deal. It’s just a paperwork exercise.
In the case of Maria Butina, though, the paperwork was the hook to arrest her and to use her failure to register under FARA as leverage to get her to testify about her “work.” The problem, at least for the FBI, was that she wasn’t a spy. As things turned out, she really was just an overly-aggressive Russian grad student at American University who really, really loved guns and was trying to ingratiate herself with the NRA. But the Justice Department came down on her like a ton of bricks, forced her into taking a plea, and sentenced HER to 18 months in a federal prison: for conspiring to fail to fill out a form. The federalsentencing guidelines for a first-time offender violating this law is 0-6 months in a minimum-security work camp and a fine of up to $5,000. That, apparently, was never an option for Butina.
Forgive me if this is burying the lede, but I also want to talk about how Maria Butina got into this predicament in the first place. We know that she was very active in the gun rights movement in both Russia and the U.S. and that she sought to improve contact between gun groups in both countries. We also know that she met and began dating Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock.com. We learned recently, thanks to Byrne himself, that he was a longtime FBI source and that the FBI directed him to begin dating Butina. He did so. And he reported back to the FBI that she was simply a graduate student. That wasn’t good enough for the FBI, though and, according to Byrne, he was instructed to go back to Butina, to begin a sexual relationship with her, and to again report back to the FBI. He did that, too.
In the end, the Justice Department accused her publicly of “trading sexual favors” for access, an accusation that prosecutors had to withdraw. It was patently untrue. But that didn’t stop them from accusing her in the press of being a Russian spy, which she was not. And it didn’t stop the judge from giving her three times the maximum sentence called for by the sentencing guidelines.
I will ask your forgiveness again if I sound like a broken record. But this is how the FBI makes their cases. They entrap people. I’ve written extensively about how the FBI brazenly carried out a sting operation against me (unsuccessfully) that could have resulted in an espionage conviction and as much as 30 years in prison. They did the same thing to Butina.
Butina wasn’t committing a crime, so they just made something up, leaked it to the press, allowed it to influence the public and the judge, and hoped she would cave and take a plea. She did. Byrne went on CNN last week to say that two of the three people who instructed him to do all of this were James Comey, Peter Strzok, and another as-yet-unnamed individual. The operation was hatched at the top. The whole story sickens me.
With the deck stacked the way it was, there was probably nothing that Butina or her attorneys could have done to save her. The fix was in. I wish I had been able to convey to her something that one of my attorneys said to me on the day that I finally took a plea to a greatly reduced charge in 2012:
“Do you know what your problem is? Your problem is that you think this is about justice. It’s not about justice. It’s about mitigating damage.”
Nice system we have.
- Criminals Are Now Sexually Assaulting People By Hacking Their Internet-Enabled Dildos And Butt Plugs
In the Bluetooth and internet-enabled age, sexual assault can now happen from anywhere, at any time. That is, of course, assuming you walk around with an internet-enabled dildo shoved up your ass 24 hours a day.
This phenomenon was recently covered, at length, in a Daily Star article where the subheading is actually, “Security expert showed how easy it is to hack a butt-plug”.
Internet-enabled vibrators and sex toys are meant for couples that seek to “spice up their love lives” using what is being called a “new generation of teledildonic devices”. We swear, we are not making this up.
Yes, gone are the pesky days of actually having to reach out and touch your partner to stimulate them. In this day and age, who has time for such an archaic act, when fulfilling your relationship sexual duties is now as easy as hitting the Staples “That Was Easy” button?
Or Jim Cramer’s “BUY BUY BUY” button…
But with the good comes the bad, and the main problem is that some of the sex toys, including some that feature cameras, can be easily hacked, turning your private sexual encounters into an unwanted “gangbang” of sorts.
Believe it or not, the idea of sex toys over the Internet isn’t a new one, either. It was first floated back in 1998, when it was patented by Warren J. Sandvick, Jim W. Hughes, and David Alan Atkinson. And back in 1993, David Rothchild predicted the basic idea in an essay. The word “teledildonics” was actually born in 1975.
The diagram below shows the original patent for such a device.
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When the 1998 patent expired in August 2018, the “teledildonics gold rush” took off. But, like with any new burgeoning technological device, they are susceptible to hackers.In fact, Italian infosec researcher Giovanni Mellini demonstrated (hopefully not on himself) in 2017 how a Bluetooth enabled butt plug could easily be taken over by hackers and allow unauthorized access.
The devices use Bluetooth to allow sexual partners to control each other’s pleasure remotely. Mellini showed how a hacker could easily gain access to a device and commit a wireless sexual assault. Yes, imagine standing in line to order your Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks when the ole’ butt plug accidentally kicks in…
Trend Micro also demonstrated how criminals could hack into a web connected vibrator at the CeBIT technology fair in Germany.
Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro said:
“If I hack a vibrator it’s just fun. But if I can get to the back-end, I can blackmail the manufacturer.”
The fact that some of these devices have cameras attached to them makes the security threat all the more worrisome.
Sex toy maker Lovense, who manufactures the compromised butt plug, said: “There are three layers of security. The server side, the way we transfer information from the user’s phone to our server and on the client side. We take our customer’s private data very seriously, which is why we don’t serve any on our servers.”
Shanlon Wu, a US lawyer who specializes in sex crimes says that unauthorized access to a sex toy is rape: “The typical definition of a felony-type sexual abuse is an unconsented-to penetration, whether that penetration is with a body part or with an object.”
He continued: “If I’m entering a boxing match … I’m consenting, obviously, to the contest with my opponent. If he hits me, I can’t be yelling, ‘Oh, he assaulted me, he punched me!’ because we’re consenting to punching each other. But if his corner man, his manager, comes out and clocks me in the head during the match, they can’t argue, ‘You consented to a boxing match, so anybody gets to beat up on you.’”
The Secret Barrister, an anonymous legal expert whose book Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken lifts the lid on how the legal profession really works agreed:
“My instinct is yes, it would be an offense. Consent would potentially be vitiated as the nature and quality of the act consented to (automated sexual activity) would have been replaced with an act not consented to (human-operated sexual activity). It is arguably on similar lines to cases where deception as to an offender’s gender has the effect of rendering otherwise consensual activity non-consensual.”
- Moscow Fuels Arctic LNG Race With Billions Of Dollars
Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,
Novatek, Russia’s largest private natural gas company, will receive a tax deduction of about US$600 million (40 billion rubles) from the regional budget of Yamal-Nenets and US$1.5 billion (100 billion rubles) from the federal budget to build an LNG export terminal in the autonomous region in northwestern Siberia, Russian daily RBC reported this week.
The information, which was confirmed by Novatek, is the latest indication that Moscow is doubling down on liquefied natural gas at a time of growing demand for the commodity that will inevitably displace a portion of demand for one of Russia’s top export commodities, oil.
Novatek, which last year overtook Gazprom in market capitalization, operates the Yamal LNG plant, which has a nameplate capacity of 17.4 million tons annually, and is building the Arctic LNG plant, which will add another 19.8 million tons when completed. Eventually, Novatek plans to operate total annual liquefaction capacity of 60 million tons.
The Russia company is not going it alone. Its partners in Arctic LNG 2 include Total, CNPC, Japan Arctic LNG, and CNOOC. There were many reports that Saudi Aramco would buy into the project, but with 60 percent for Novatek and 10 percent for each of the minority partners, all the stakes have been divided– and Novatek has said it would not reduce its 60-percent holding in the project.
Novatek is widely seen as the spearhead of Russia’s international LNG expansion. Gazprom also produces LNG but on a smaller scale than the private company, for the time being. Earlier this year, in an interview with Bloomberg, Novatek’s chief financial officer Mark Gyetvay said Russia could emerge as one of the top four global LNG producers over the next few years.
Bloomberg estimates that from April this year, the U.S. and Qatar could both have installed capacity of 100 million tons annually by 2030, sharing the top spot, with Australia following with 95 million tons annually and Russia coming fourth with 75 million tons of LNG capacity.
Estimates are an uncertain thing, however. Low gas prices, especially in the key Asian markets, have stalled a lot of private LNG projects, notably in the United States. This is where government support for Novatek becomes essential. With it, the company could stick to its plans and schedules and add production capacity before competitors who struggle with project delays and cost overruns. And there is another factor working for Novatek: climate change.
As the weather warms, parts of the Arctic are melting, opening up the Northern Sea Route for longer periods than before. The route, which incidentally plays an important Part in China’s Belt and Silk Road initiative, cuts shipping times from Western Europe to China by as much as 15 days. This naturally has important implications for pricing and, consequently, competitiveness.
It is no coincidence Chinese companies hold stakes in both of Novatek’s LNG facilities. In the Yamal LNG plant, these include CNPC with a 20-percent interest, and the state Silk Road Fund, with another 9.9 percent, bringing the total Chinese participation to almost 40 percent.
China will emerge as the world’s largest LNG importer in the coming years and it is making sure to secure supply early on, led by purely economic considerations. This means other suppliers would need to find ways to make their LNG more competitive, at least while the gas glut lasts, pressuring prices and turning the market into a buyers’ market.
- China's Lunar Rover Has Encountered Strange 'Goo' On Dark Side Of The Moon
After several months hanging out on the dark side of the Moon, China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover has really stepped in it according to NBC News.
The mission’s rover, Yutu-2, came across a “gel-like” substance on its 8th day – which caused scientists to put a full stop on its planned schedule and try to figure out what exactly the goo is.
On July 28, the Chang’e-4 team was preparing to power Yutu-2 down for its usual midday “nap” to protect the rover from high temperatures and radiation from the sun high in the sky. A team member checking images from the rover’s main camera spotted a small crater that seemed to contain material with a color and luster unlike that of the surrounding lunar surface.
The drive team, excited by the discovery, called in their lunar scientists. Together, the teams decided to postpone Yutu-2’s plans to continue west and instead ordered the rover to check out the strange material. –NBC News
To analyze the material, Chinese scientists used the Yutu-2’s Visible and Near-Infrared Spectrometer (VNIS), which can study materials based on they way light is scattered or reflected.
Tracks made by Yutu-2 while navigating hazards during lunar day 8, which occurred during late July and early August 2019.China Lunar Exploration Project) The tight-lipped Chinese have only said that the substance is “gel-like” and an “unusual color.”
So what could it be? NBC News notes that outside researchers have suggested that the ‘goo’ could be “melt glass created from meteorites striking the surface of the moon.”
Lunar goo is far from the first time scientists have been surprised.
Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt discovered orange-colored soil near the mission’s Taurus-Littrow landing site in 1972, prompting excitement from both Schmitt and his moonwalk colleague, Gene Cernan. Lunar geologists eventually concluded that the orange soil was created during an explosive volcanic eruption 3.64 billion years ago. –NBC News
The Chang’e-4 mission left earth in early December, 2018, touching down on the moon on January 3. It had covered a total distance of 890 feet by the time they encountered the goo.
- Is China Backing Away From Xi's "Made In China, 2025" Plan?
Authored by Eliot Chen via MacroPolo.org,
“Made in China 2025” Unmade? Visualizing Beijing’s Response to US Pressure Through Media Analysis
Key Findings
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The sudden purging of “Made in China 2025” coverage in Chinese official media was likely a direct response to the escalation of US-China trade tensions after March 2018.
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Media analysis of MIC2025 shows how the ebb and flow of coverage can be deliberate and calculated, particularly as Beijing responds to pressure and backlash from abroad.
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Official media is inherently a political tool, so the fact that Beijing proactively dialed back media coverage of its cherished MIC2025 may be considered a modest concession of sorts. But Beijing’s move appears to be more of a “concession in perception” rather than meaningfully weakening the policy.
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Continued references to MIC2025 in media coverage of China-European relations throughout 2018, as well as frequent usage of related catchphrases, suggest Beijing is still pursuing some version of the industrial policy as part of its foreign relations.
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More similar cases and data are needed to better determine how China manages its media when confronting external pressure and to offer some predictive utility of Chinese behavior in these instances.
Methodology in Brief
Articles in Chinese and US media were sourced from People’s Daily, Xinhua, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and The Hill, with dates ranging from the earliest mention of “Made in China 2025” to July 1, 2019. The total sample size is 2,975 (CN = 2,542; US = 433).
On the US side, sentiment analysis was conducted on the contents of each article using the AFINN lexicon to pair each word with an integer score on a positive-negative scale of 5 to -5. Chinese articles were not subject to sentiment analysis because tools are still insufficient to properly and accurately conduct such analysis on Chinese language content.
A full explanation of the methodology can be found here.
Introduction
When China launched its 21st century industrial policy under the banner of “Made in China 2025” (MIC2025) in May 2015, few in the United States were paying attention. While China specialists may have examined MIC2025’s contents and analyzed its significance, it took about three years before the plan became a focal point of US-China trade tensions.
One factor that changed significantly in those three years was the intensity of US media coverage of MIC2025. The spotlight that was eventually placed on the plan got Washington’s attention: from think tanks and business groups to Congress and policymakers, MIC2025 quickly became short-hand for China’s “Sputnik moment” aimed at surpassing and then replacing US technological leadership.
The timing also aligned with a shift in China strategy under the Trump administration, where MIC2025 became the embodiment of Beijing’s unfair competitive practices that included subsidizing state enterprises and crowding out foreign competitors.
The outcome of the convergence of US mainstream media and policymakers’ intense focus on MIC2025 is now well known. MIC2025 became a central target of the US Trade Representative’s Section 301 report in March 2018 that effectively launched the trade war. On the Chinese side, shortly after the issuance of the report, all coverage of MIC2025 in domestic official media virtually disappeared.
But when exactly did China kill all mentions of MIC2025? And why did Beijing take this action? Was it a response to US pressure?
This case study seeks to offer some preliminary answers, in part by reconstructing the sequence of events that led to the eventual outcome on both the US and Chinese sides. Based on a first-of-its-kind dataset, this case captures both the blow-by-blow and the scale of US and Chinese media coverage of MIC2025 from 2014 to 2019. The data is complemented by sentiment analysis to determine whether the extent of negative or positive US media coverage may have also factored into Beijing’s response.
Media analysis can be a useful approach that yields insights on how behaviors and perceptions could affect policy actions and responses. Existing literature has shown how media coverage, headlines, and public discourse can shape mutual perceptions and influence elite opinion. Elite opinion, in turn, tends to affect policy actions. For instance, research has shown that foreign affairs coverage in US media tends to mirrorthe current administration’s preferred policies.
My analysis attempts to quantify and explore the correlation between American elite perceptions and whether they affected Chinese responses specific to MIC2025. The findings offer some inferences of this relationship, but additional case studies and data are needed before general conclusions or causal linkages can be established.
Nonetheless, this approach can potentially be applied to other areas of policy interest in the future, particularly where media has a disproportionate impact on how particular issues are viewed and characterized.
What Happened to MIC2025, and How Did It Happen?
MIC2025 (中国制造2025) first cropped up in Chinese official media at the end of June 2014, and then steadily picked up in 1Q2015, expanding significantly after the plan’s formal launch in May of the same year. From 2015 to 2017, Xinhua and People’s Dailypublished over 1,400 articles referencing the plan, with the coverage peaking in 4Q2015. During that period, MIC2025 was referenced in more than four articles a day.
By contrast, US media coverage of the plan was minimal over the same period. All told, the five media outlets from 2014 to 2017 published just 17 articles that mentioned MIC2025. When coverage finally shot up in 1Q2017 (up 50% compared to the previous quarter), negative news reports of the plan also began to emerge. The change in quantity and tone of coverage followed shortly after Berlin-based think tank MERICS published its 76-page report on MIC2025 in December 2016.
One of the first major criticisms of the plan actually came from the European Chamber of Commerce, which cited the MERICS report. Senior Chinese officials then responded and publicly defended MIC2025 for the first time. This sequence underscores how American media outlets appear to be rather slow in recognizing the significance of Chinese policies, even a plan as expansive and exhaustively covered in Chinese media as MIC2025.
At this point, the US media’s attention intensified. Coverage of MIC2025 saw mostly continuous growth from 2017 to about the end of 2Q2018. That quarter marked peak MIC2025 coverage, likely directly related to the issuance of the Section 301 report that referenced the Chinese plan a full 116 times. For the first time in 2Q2018, US media coverage of MIC2025 surpassed that in the Chinese official media.
Notably, the sentiment of the US media’s coverage began to tilt negative at this time as well. My data show an increasing amount of negative coverage referencing the plan emerged after the Section 301 report, suggesting that the tone of media’s coverage started to converge with the critical view of the Trump administration.
However, net sentiment was still in positive territory in the aggregate, even after the release of the Section 301 report. While this may suggest that the tone of MIC2025 coverage had little effect on perceptions, it’s worth noting that negative sentiment articles spiked dramatically and suddenly from essentially zero. As a result of the low-base effect, policymakers that began paying attention to MIC2025 coverage around this period would likely feel bombarded with negative coverage of MIC2025 even if the aggregate is net positive (see Methodology for further explanation of sentiment analysis).
For the rest of 2018, US media coverage of MIC2025 remained relatively consistent before petering out in 2Q2019. This could be due to the fact that for the previous three quarters, mentions of MIC2025 basically vanished from Chinese official media.
Why Did Beijing Scrub MIC2025 from Official Media When It Did?
Based on this data, MIC2025 coverage in the Chinese official media basically disappeared on May 17, 2018, more than a month before US newspapers began reporting on its suspension at the end of June 2018.
The timing of this cutoff is noteworthy, because it followed a flurry of activity in US-China relations, including the release in March of the Section 301 report, the Trump administration’s April announcement of slapping tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods, and trade negotiations from May 2-4 that ended with no deal.
It’s curious why Beijing chose to make the move of preventing all mention of MIC2025 in Chinese media. Although it’s impossible to know exactly what transpired during trade negotiations, this retreat from Beijing on the domestic front did not seem like one of the major demands from the US side. Washington instead wanted Beijing to halt subsidies to MIC2025 industries and to accept US restrictions of Chinese exports from MIC2025 industries.
Although difficult to infer correlation, the week that MIC2025 coverage ceased in Chinese media was the same week the US President announced on Twitter that ZTE would get amnesty. Just two weeks earlier, China had pressed the US to relax its ban on the supply of American components to ZTE, which had been punished for violating US sanctions on Iran.
A subsequent leak of an official directive in June 2018, picked up by China Digital Times, re-emphasized that the media should not report on MIC2025, confirming that China’s Central Propaganda Department had earlier issued a media gag order to not mention the plan. While the timing of the gag order may have been mere coincidence, it’s possible that Washington’s leniency on ZTE factored into Beijing’s response on MIC2025 at that time.
What Coverage of MIC2025 Remained?
Coverage of MIC2025 in Chinese media did indeed decline significantly after May 17, 2018. What little remained–about 40 articles over an entire year–were mostly stories about factories launched or new schools built to further MIC2025 goals. More than a quarter of these articles were editorials or op-eds, often condemning the US position in the trade war.
At least one article, published in both Xinhua and People’s Daily, stands out because it incorporated MIC2025 as part of a historical account celebrating the 40th anniversary of Reform and Opening Up. The fact that MIC2025 is being directly linked to Reform and Opening Up suggests that Beijing continues to attach significance to the plan, if not in name then in substance and spirit.
Of some note are the five out of the 40 articles that mention MIC2025 in the context of China-European relations. These articles date from mid-2018 to spring 2019, and include pieces about strengthening ties with Italy, cooperative dialogues with the EU, and a meeting between President Xi and French President Emmanuel Macron. The latter pieces were published in both Xinhua and People’s Daily with identical headlines and content, suggesting that the inclusion of MIC2025 was no accident but a deliberate move.
Even though a major European business group was the first to criticize the plan, Beijing appears to believe that MIC2025 is not nearly as controversial or sensitive in China-EU relations. It’s possible Beijing believes that some EU countries would be more willing to work together on MIC2025.
Is MIC2025 Really Dead or Just Replaced?
The term MIC2025 may have been put on the “endangered terms” list but its spirit seems to live on under different guises. To determine whether the spirit of MIC2025 is still alive, I looked at relevant phrases often associated with MIC2025 to see whether there was any corresponding increase in their usage after May 2018.
Two terms that relate to MIC2025 are “indigenous innovation” (自主创新) and “core technology” (核心技术). These are not new—the former has been used officially since the Jiang Zemin era (1989-2002)—but analysts believe they have gained renewed significance under President Xi’s new development priorities and are closely associated with MIC2025.
The data show that after the official retirement of MIC2025 in mid-2018, mentions of “indigenous innovation” remained steady, while references to “core technology” actually saw an uptick on average. But 2Q2019 saw a spike in both terms, up 200% and 400% respectively since April, suggesting that these terms could again dominate discourse on industrial policy priorities, with or without MIC2025.
In fact, even MIC2025 may be seeing a mini revival since May 2019, following the abrupt end of yet another round of US-China trade negotiations. References to MIC2025 have resurfaced in Chinese official media not only in spirited denunciations of the US trade war position but also in the type of regular domestic news that were common before May 2018.
The Remaking of MIC2025?
The sudden purging of virtually all coverage of MIC2025 in Chinese media was likely a direct response to escalating US-China trade tensions after March 2018. However, rather than conceding to US demands to significantly weaken the policy, Beijing’s move appeared to have been more of a “concession in perception.” That is, the term may no longer be discussed much, but the industrial policies around which MIC2025 is built have not disappeared, as evidenced by the continued referencing of “indigenous innovation” and “core technologies.”
More broadly, media analysis of this particular policy shows how the ebb and flow of coverage can be deliberate and calculated, particularly as Beijing responds to pressure and backlash from abroad. This points to the possibility that media coverage is more than just a blunt instrument of propaganda—it is often used tactically for marketing policy priorities and to manage perceptions, both domestic and foreign. Since official media is inherently a political tool in China, the fact that Beijing proactively dialed back media coverage of its cherished MIC2025 can be considered a political concession.
Whether this is sufficient to permanently shift the spotlight away from MIC2025 in trade negotiations is a question that needs further investigation. Moreover, to move beyond the preliminary insights contained in this analysis will require examining more cases of Chinese policies that are considered controversial in the West.
Some of these cases may include the Belt and Road Initiative or the notion of “self-reliance.” With more cases and data, a pattern may emerge in how China manages its media when confronting external pressure and may even offer some predictive utility for Chinese behavior in these instances.
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