- Is The World Safe From Global Conflict In 2019?
Authored by M.K.Bhadrakumar via The Indian Punchline,
Armageddon: Will it come on Trump’s watch?
Is 2019 going to be the year of the Armageddon? The answer is a definitive ‘No’. As 2018 ended, the potential for war was looming and Russian President Vladimir Putin even refused to rule out a nuclear war. But then, the statesmen grappling with international security also know that nukes are useless. They serve the purpose of deterrence but cannot be used as offensive weapons.
In fact, the nearest we came to a nuclear flashpoint was during last year over North Korea. But that point is well behind us. North Korea is no longer considered as a great threat to global security – although it is fairly clear by now, thanks to satellite imagery and other reports, that claims that Pyongyang was shutting down its nuclear weapons testing must be taken with a pinch of salt. Defusing the crisis with North Korea stands out as President Trump’s most successful summit diplomacy so far.
Coming back to Russia’s tensions with the West, no one thinks of the likelihood of the tensions cascading to a doomsday, either. Putin’s startling remark can be put in perspective. These days, what is uppermost on his mind is the planned US exit from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Putin has repeatedly warned that if the US scuttles the INF Treaty, it would trigger a Russian response.
Suffice to say, when Putin made the seemingly ominous remark lamenting that the global fears of a nuclear war have ebbed, he had a political agenda to draw attention to the growing instability due to the tensions in Russia’s relations with the West and the ensuing great depletion of a common agenda apropos international security today. What Putin implied was that if the relations continue to be in free fall, a point may come when the situation regarding nuclear weapons may spin out of control. As a Russian analyst noted, “Putin believes that nuclear weapons are Russia’s ultimate argument that should influence Western politicians’ thinking.”
However, the likelihood of western sanctions against Russia getting lifted in 2019 is practically nil. Russia has survived the sanctions but they have and are taking a heavy toll on the Russian economy. Apart from limiting imports of Western energy and other technologies, Russia’s access to international capital markets remains blocked and international investors feel discouraged to have dealings in Russia.
Indeed, Russia’s “pivot” to China is an outcome of the western sanctions and the political relations with China are at their highest level at present. The mutual trust at the leadership level is unprecedented and in overall terms, China remains Russia’s largest and strategically most significant partner in Asia.
Nonetheless, as an influential Moscow pundit wrote recently, “It’s no secret that amidst the war in the financial sector that the United States is waging against Russia, Chinese companies and banks were in no hurry to create mechanisms to bypass these (western) sanctions. Often they refused to work with Russian clients, which contrasts with the highest level of political relations between the countries and the mutual trust of their leaders… In this regard… the exacerbation of the face-off between China and the United States could be both a boon and a bane for Russia’s foreign policy.”
In the final analysis, an improvement of Russia’s relations with the US will depend on the conclusion of the ongoing inquiry on Trump’s alleged “Russia collusion.” The possibility of such a thing happening cannot be ruled out. At any rate, the chances of the inquiry getting carried over to 2020 appear rather slim. But, on the other hand, 2020 also promises to be a turbulent election year in US politics, which precludes a controversial foreign policy initiative such as on a radical improvement of relations with Russia on Trump’s part.
Equally, Candidate Trump’s campaign for a second term in the 2020 November presidential election will also prevent any sharp deterioration in the US-China relations through 2019. The two countries are almost certainly coming to an accommodation on the trade disputes and related issues. Maintaining economic interdependence with the US is important for China’s economic growth. Thus, Beijing may address the crux of the “trade war” – its ambitious Make in China 2015 plan, which has become a bone of contention for the Trump administration.
A change to China’s manufacturing blueprint cannot be ruled out. Some policymakers in Beijing have signaled that that the MIC 2025 program could be replaced with a new vision that one the one hand encourages foreign investment while on the other hand drop its previous market share targets devolving upon domination by Chinese companies – in short, diluted to reflect key concessions to the US critics.
Arguably, even the 2025 timeline might be pushed back. Of course, this will not mean that Beijing will abandon its quest for developing indigenous advanced technology or for reducing its reliance on Western know-how, but, simply put, new industrial goals may be set discreetly under the rubric of China’s ongoing structural reforms.
There have been reports that Beijing may likely announce fair competition norms for state-owned, private, and foreign enterprises based on the market-oriented concept of “competitive neutrality” that ensures level playing field to Chinese and foreign participants.
Equally, it must be noted that the Trump administration should be aware that a trade war with China in an election year is not desirable. Quite obviously, the supply glut in the US market for soybeans already makes a telling political story.
China is not in the least interested in a New Cold War with the US. A senior Chinese diplomat last weekend even called for a “responsible” US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “They [US] have been in Afghanistan for 17 years. If they are leaving the country, they should try to leave in a gradual and a responsible way,” said Lijian Zhao, deputy Chinese ambassador in Islamabad, while speaking to the Pakistani television.
Lijian added, “If a civil war broke out after the U.S. withdrawal, the first countries affected will be Pakistan, will be China, and it will be the immediate neighbors. So, we have to sit together with the parties concerned so that we start a peace process.” The Chinese diplomat admitted that Beijing worries about the East Turkestan Islamic Movement using Afghanistan as base to foment violence in Xinjiang. Lijian said, “They are still in Afghanistan. They are still posing a threat to the national security of Xinjiang, of China. What they want is to establish a separate state, to separate Xinjiang out of China. This is totally unacceptable to China. So, we will work with the Afghan government to try to eliminate this group.” (VOA)
No matter the Chinese motivations, it will get noted in Washington that Beijing will not gang up with Moscow and Tehran to act as a spoiler and derail the Afghan peace talks that the quadripartite group of US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Pakistan is promoting.
The bottom line is that China is not breaking international rules or order. Nor can China be isolated, given the high degree of integration of its economic system into the world economy. “If the US fights with China, it will lose more allies. Nobody wants to choose sides. Everybody wants to stand by… China cannot leave the world, and the world cannot leave China. So, you can’t isolate China. This is very different from the Soviet Union,” to quote veteran China hand Ambassador Charles Freeman in a recent interview.
- Visualizing The Military Imbalance In The Taiwan Strait
In a speech marking 40 years since the improvement in ties with Taiwan, Chinese President Xi Jinping has has once again called for peaceful reunification, also warning that China reserves the the right to use force.
Although it is self-governed and de-facto independent, Taiwan has never formally declared independence. Xi also said that reunification is “an inevitable requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” and that his government “reserves the option of taking all necessary measures” against outside interference with peaceful reunification.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Xi’s comments are in line with China’s long-standing policy on the issue and it is generally regarded as one of the greatest flashpoints in relations between Beijing and Washington.
Despite the improvement in ties in recent years, China has never ruled out the possibility of invasion and it has continued acquiring the military capability to do so. Regional tensions have also grown due to China’s territorial claims and aspirations in the South China Sea, something which has prompted Japan to cast aside its postwar pacifism.
Even though the possibility of China taking Taiwan by force is low, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait is firmly in China’s favor…
The following infographic provides an overview of that imbalance and it is based on an annual U.S. government report.
You will find more infographics at Statista
- Brandon Smith: Trump Is A Pied Piper For The New World Order Agenda
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
In my last article, ‘The Fed Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda’, I explored and dismantled recent propaganda surrounding the Federal Reserve’s tightening actions, including the propaganda that Jerome Powell is some kind of rogue central banker who is rebalancing the system for the good of the nation. To summarize the points made in that article:
The Fed deliberately created the “Everything Bubble” so that it could be deliberately imploded at the proper time – in other words, the crash we have been witnessing so far during the final quarter of 2018 and continuing into 2019 is a controlled demolition of the economy. Jerome Powell is not some “rebel” going against the easy money dictates of the Fed. Jerome Powell is playing the role that has been given to him. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen’s job was to inflate the bubble. Jerome Powell’s job is to crash the bubble.
This is a tactic used by the Fed and the globalists that run it for over 100 years – conjure a debt bubble, deflate the debt bubble, cause a crisis, siphon up hard assets for pennies on the dollar, use the panic to gain more power and centralization, introduce new control measures while everyone is distracted, rinse, repeat.
This process of controlled demolition needs a considerable distraction so that the central banks and the globalists ultimately avoid blame for the painful consequences of the event.
Enter Donald Trump and the false Trump vs. Globalist paradigm.
As I mentioned last week, the Fed is only one side of the equation for the crash; Trump is the other side.
Confidence games are highly varied affairs. They can be extremely simple and often obvious to everyone but the most inept and unobservant, or, they can be highly complex with many moving parts of deceit combined into a single elaborate con-machine. It is important to understand that confidence games are not just a means to steal money or valuables from unwitting people; they are also a vital part of economic manipulation, government dominance, and warfare in general. Almost all mainstream economic “authorities,” politicians, military tacticians and covert operatives are con men in one way or another.
With the exception of military tacticians acting in defense against an aggressor, con men are predominantly sociopaths. In order to carry out a “grift” against innocent people, an extreme lack of empathy is required. Understanding the mind and motivations of sociopaths and narcissistic sociopaths makes it possible to identify them faster and allows us to see their con games ahead of time.
In terms of social control, elitist con men are highly preoccupied with preventing spontaneous organization of rebellion. But this does not always involve the outright crushing of dissent. Instead, the elites prefer to use co-option and misdirection (con games) to lure rebellious movements to focus on the wrong enemy, or to trust the wrong leadership.
I am often reminded of the infiltration of the Tea Party movement by neo-conservatives in the years after the 2008 election. Neo-con-men exploited the desire among Tea Party activists for mainstream legitimacy and more widespread media coverage. They gave the activists what they wanted, by injecting their own political puppets into the movement. It did not take long for the Tea Party to abandon its initial roots in individual sovereignty and the Ron Paul campaign and adopt a decidedly statist tone. The smart people left the movement early and went on to launch their own efforts, but the goal of the establishment had been accomplished — the grass roots organized threat of the Tea Party was no more.
That said, the principles of conservative economics, small government and personal liberty remain entrenched in the American psyche and continue to grow. These ideals have a life of their own, and almost seem to act autonomously at times from any particular group or leader.
The single most important dynamo behind the rise of sovereignty activism has actually been the liberty media, or what some might call the “alternative media.” This group of people has been working tirelessly for years to inform the masses on the REAL news and data behind global events. Over time we have earned the trust of millions based on honest reporting and accurate predictions. It was only a matter of time before the establishment attempted to co-opt us as well…
The downfall of the Tea Party was a lack of cohesive leadership. There was no one there to put a stop to the neo-con infiltration. There was no one in a strong enough position to vet incoming influencers and prevent poison pills from entering the bloodstream of the movement. The problem with leadership, though, is that it denotes centralization and a bottlenecking of decisions and action. It’s quite a quandary for advocates of decentralization.
The most effective method for the establishment to sabotage a rebellion is to place one of their own puppets into a leadership position in that rebellion. This exploits the movement’s subconscious appetite for top down leadership. It neutralizes activists by tricking them into waiting for orders from on high instead of acting on their own individually. It makes a movement lazy and impotent.
The con game of false leadership goes beyond this, though. A charismatic puppet leader can trick activists into following a path completely opposite of their foundational ideals. He can turn the movement into something they would have originally despised (like turning a limited government pro-sovereignty movement into a big government pro-state cult). He can also take actions which are self-destructive, thereby making the movement appear insane or foolhardy by proxy.
I warned of this potential dynamic with Donald Trump long before the 2016 election. In fact, I predicted that Donald Trump would win the election based on the premise that the globalists were planning a grand con; to not only use Trump as a scapegoat for the crash of the “everything bubble” they had been inflating for the past 10 years, but to also use him as a pied piper to lure conservative movements into individual inaction, as well as being named as co-conspirators in the economic collapse that Trump was about to be involved in.
In my article ‘Clinton vs. Trump And The Co-Option Of The Liberty Movement,’ published in September 2016, I noted:
“To summarize, the elites need a patsy for the breakdown of the financial system they have engineered. That patsy will not be Trump per se, but conservatives in general. Whether Donald Trump is aware of this program or not, I do not know. I have no hard evidence indicating that Trump is anti-constitution; then again, I don’t have much evidence indicating he is pro-constitution. All I have at present to go by is his rhetoric, and rhetoric counts for nothing.
What I do know is that triggering a fiscal crisis under the watch of Trump and blaming conservatives is far more useful to the elites than triggering a crisis under Clinton and risk blame falling on international banking syndicates.”
The crash has now begun in the final quarter of 2018, with housing markets, auto markets and credit markets in steep decline, as well as stock markets trending into bear territory. In the same article I also stated:
“I believe Clinton is meant to lose. If this is the case and Trump is inaugurated in January of next year, the liberty movement needs to ask itself if Trump is truly an obstacle for the elites, or if he is an ally to the elites.
The Left is already salivating over the possibility that the Trump campaign will devour the liberty movement and turn it into something unrecognizable. Just take a gander at this editorial from Bloomberg called ‘The Tea Party Meets Its Maker,’ which announces the death of the “Tea Party” at the hands of Trump…”
After two years of witnessing Trump in action, it is clear to me that he is an active participant in the new world order agenda, and not just an unwitting patsy for the economic crisis.
Trump started out his presidential campaign with two very important issues. First, he argued for the need to “drain the swamp” in Washington D.C.; which included a sharp criticism of Hillary Clinton’s ties to banking elites and globalists. Second, he criticized the fraudulent state of the U.S. economy, pointing out that the stock market was in a massive bubble created by the Federal Reserve using near zero interest rates.
Trump’s first action upon entering the White House was to invite multiple “swamp creatures” into his cabinet, going against his core campaign promise. This was not all that surprising considering his past.
Trump was saved in the 1990s by Rothchild banking agent Wilber Ross, who bailed him out of his debts tied up in his failing Taj Mahal casino. Wilber Ross is now Trump’s commerce secretary. I ask, who is Trump going to be loyal to? The American people, who can offer him nothing of consequence, or the Rothschilds, who saved his public image and his billion-dollar empire?
Trump is also currently “advised” by the likes of Steven Mnuchin formerly of Goldman Sachs, Larry Kudlow formerly of the New York Fed, and John Bolton of the CFR, among others.
Trump has since flip-flopped on his economic position. Instead of warning about the huge financial bubble the Fed had created, he adopted a Twitter campaign TAKING CREDIT for the bubble for the past two years.
Some people will argue that Trump has placed blame on the Fed and exposed their operations, but this is theater based on selective observations. Trump continues to set himself up as the fulcrum or source of the current crash. Just this week his administration called the market decline a “little glitch” which would be solved once a trade deal with China was solidified. In other words, Trump is saying the trade war is the cause of the crash, not the Fed. Trump then at the same time blames the Fed.
Confusing? Not really, when you understand that Trump is part of a grand con game.
If Trump was truly interested in bringing down the globalists, then he would not be consistently providing them with such perfect cover for their crimes. I have been warning for the past year that the trade war is a perfect distraction for the public as the Fed unwinds QE and raises interest rates to kill the Everything Bubble. Trump continues to attach his administration to stock market performance while also blaming stock declines on his own trade conflicts with China. But what about Trump’s supposed battle with the Fed? It’s all wrestle-mania.
As the stock rally crumbled in the final quarter of 2018, the script that Trump would follow in response was also rather predictable.
In my article ‘In A Battle Between Trump And The Fed, Who Really Wins,’ published in February 2017, I reminded readers that the goal of the Fed is a controlled demolition of the U.S. economy and the dollar to open the door for the “global reset.” The reset is the event that the globalists hope will allow them to introduce a single global currency system and single world economy with the IMF and perhaps the BIS at the helm.
In my article ‘Trump vs. The Fed: America Sacrificed At The NWO Altar,’ I outlined the details of the con game. The globalists WANT to sacrifice the Fed and the dollar to make way for their new world order system, but they cannot do this in a vacuum. They need a distraction. Trump’s “battle with the fed” will likely escalate into a full-blown war. But Trump’s position against the Fed is not honorable.
According to the narrative, Trump is not going after the Fed because it has created the everything bubble and is now deliberately imploding it. Trump is going after the Fed because he wants the Fed to make the everything bubble even bigger by continuing to prop up a stock rally that Trump has attached to the success of his presidency. Trump will be painted as a spoiled baby in the mainstream, throwing a tantrum and attacking the “innocent” central bankers who were only trying to “normalize markets.”
In the meantime, the globalists can slowly kill the world reserve status of the dollar while avoiding the blame for the severe economic consequences this will produce. A conflict between the White House and the central bank will be presented as a sign that faith in U.S. debt and the longevity of the dollar is a bad bet. Foreign holders of dollars and T-bills, already quietly dumping these assets, will accelerate the decoupling. Trump’s trade war activities add to the distraction, creating a brilliant theater in which conservatives are conned into supporting a puppet leader on the verge of collapse, and confirming the crazed arguments against conservative principles in the minds of globalists and leftists.
The con game is to get liberty advocates to invest themselves fully in Trump, to the point that we end up owning every mistake he makes, and every disaster that is pinned on him. There is a concerted propaganda campaign targeting the liberty movement which is telling us that Trump is playing “4D Chess;” that Trump is planning a “coup” against the banking elites, that Trump is planning to bring down the Fed as a means to save the U.S., and even that Trump is working with Jerome Powell to crash the globalist system as a means to “restore the Republic.”
While Trump throws a bone to conservatives at times, including promises of a border wall, or a pull-out in Syria, there is no evidence to support the fantasy that Trump is some kind of ingenious tactician battling the the forces of evil using his wits while inside the system. But, there is considerable evidence as I have linked above supporting my position that Trump is controlled opposition working with the globalists to initiate a collapse that will be blamed on conservative ideals and limited government liberty activists. We shall see in due course. It is unfortunate though how many otherwise very intelligent people within the liberty movement have bought into Trump as a hero on a white horse.
The activists and alternative media are the real heroes. They are the people that pushed liberty philosophy into the mainstream. Trump merely rode the wave that they created. Even if he was a legitimate conservative and constitutionalist (which he is not), the movement doesn’t need his leadership. It never did. The globalists know this and hope to chain us to Trump as he sinks into historical oblivion, destroying us all in the process.
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- FBI Testing Amazon's Facial Recognition Software
The CIA isn’t the only federal agency making use of Amazon’s vast offerings – as the FBI has been testing the Seattle-based megacorp’s facial recognition software – Amazon Rekognition, as a potential method of scanning vast amounts of video surveillance footage which the agency routinely gathers during investigations.
The pilot program was launched in early 2018 according to FBI officials, after several high-profile counterterrorism investigations which strained the FBI’s current technological capabilities, reports Nextgov.com.
One example of the FBI’s struggle to keep up with data was during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada killed Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured 422. As part of the investigation, the FBI gathered a petabyte worth of data (one million gigabytes) – much of it comprising video from cellphones and surveillance cameras.
“We had agents and analysts, eight per shift, working 24/7 for three weeks going through the video footage of everywhere Stephen Paddock was the month leading up to him coming and doing the shooting,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Christine Halvorsen, speaking from a Las Vegas Amazon Web Services conference in November. She described how the FBI has been using Amazon’s cloud platform to carry out counterterrorism probes – noting that Amazon Rekognition could have processed the same amount of data from the Las Vegas shooting “in 24 hours,” roughly three weeks faster than it took human FBI agents to find Paddock’s face amid a mountain of video evidence.
“Think about that,” Halvorsen said, noting that technology like Amazon Rekognition frees up FBI agents and analysts to apply their skills to other aspects of the investigation or other cases.
“The cases don’t stop, the threats keep going,” Halvorsen added. “Being able to not pull people off that and have computers do it is very important.” –Nextgov.com
Amazon provides a significant number of services to the US government – primarily through its cloud business, AWS, which counts the Defense Department and the CIA among its customers.
While it’s unclear how the facial recognition software may be used in the public sector, the Daily Beast reported in October that Amazon had pitched the software to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement last summer, which has resulted in both lawmakers and Amazon employees asking questions, according to Nextgov.
The company does not list any federal clients on its customer page, and currently only identifies as a customer one local law enforcement agency, the Washington County Sheriff Office.
Once a customer, the city of Orlando canceled its own pilot of Amazon Rekognition last June after public outcry over civil liberties. –Nextgov.com
Just one question; is Rekognition racist?
- Xi Jinping Thinks China Is World's Only Sovereign State
Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,
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The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system of nation states or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether.
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Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.
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The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing’s unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes, and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.
The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether. Pictured: Xi Jinping (center) at a Chinese Communist Party event on January 2, 2019 in Beijing. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein-Pool/Getty Images)
“I hear prominent Americans, disappointed that China has not become a democracy, claiming that China poses a threat to the American way of life,” Jimmy Carter wrote on the last day of 2018 in a Washington Post op-ed.
That claim, Carter tells us, is a “dangerous notion.”
There is nothing more dangerous than a notion from the 39th president, even on China. China, despite what he said, threatens not only America’s way of life but also the existence of the American republic. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has, in recent years, been making the extraordinary case that the U.S. is not a sovereign state.
The breathtaking position puts China’s aggressive actions into a far more ominous context.
Carter, and almost all others who comment on Chinese foreign policy, see Beijing competing for influence in the current international order. That existing order, accepted virtually everywhere, is based on the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which recognizes the sovereignty of individual states that are supposed to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs. Those states now compete and cooperate in a framework, largely developed after World War II, of treaties, conventions, covenants, and norms.
Many Chinese policymakers believe they are entitled to dominate others, especially people
son their periphery. That concept underpinned the imperial tributary system in which states near and far were supposed to acknowledge Chinese rule. Although there is no “cultural DNA” that forces today’s communist leaders to view the world as emperors did long ago, the tributary system nonetheless presents, as Stephen Platt of the University of Massachusetts points out, “a tempting model” of “a nostalgic ‘half-idealized, half-mythologized past.’ “In that past, there were no fixed national boundaries. There was even no concept of “China.” There was, as Yi-Zheng Lian wrote in the New York Times, “a sovereignty system with the emperor’s compound in the middle.” Around that were concentric rings. “The further from the center, the less the center’s control and one’s obligations to it,” Lian noted. The Chinese, in fact, were perhaps the first to develop the idea of a borderless world.
In short, Chinese emperors claimed they had the Mandate of Heaven over tianxia, or “All Under Heaven,” as they believed they were, in the words of Fei-Ling Wang of Georgia Tech, “predestined and compelled to order and rule the entire world that is known and reachable, in reality or in pretension.” As acclaimed journalist Howard French writes in Everything Under the Heavens, “One can argue that there has never been a more universal conception of rule.”
Unfortunately, the current Chinese leader harbors ambitions of imposing the tianxia model on others. As Charles Horner of the Hudson Institute told me, “The Communist Party of China remains committed to ordering the People’s Republic of China as a one-party dictatorship, and that is perforce its starting point for thinking about ordering the world.” In other words, a dictatorial state naturally thinks about the world in dictatorial terms. Tianxia is by its nature a top-down, dictatorial system.
Xi Jinping has employed tianxia language for more than a decade, but recently his references have become unmistakable. “The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven are one family,” he declared in his 2017 New Year’s Message. He recycled tianxia themes in his 2018 New Year’s message and hinted at them in his most recent one as well.
Xi has also used Chinese officials to explain the breathtaking scope of his revolutionary message. Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in Study Times, the Central Party School newspaper, in September 2017 wrote that Xi Jinping’s “thought on diplomacy”—a “thought” in Communist Party lingo is an important body of ideological work—”has made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.” Wang with his time reference is almost certainly pointing to the Westphalian system of sovereign states. His use of “transcended,” consequently, hints that Xi wants a world without sovereign states—or at least no more of them than China.
The trend of Xi’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether, trying to replace Westphalia’s cacophony with tianxia‘s orderliness.
Xi not only spouts tianxia-like statements, his regime also employs scholars to study the application of tianxia to the world.
He also acts tianxia. His China in December 2016 seized a U.S. Navy drone in international water in the South China Sea. Chinese spokesman Yang Yujun said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency, that one of its navy’s lifeboats “located an unidentified device” and retrieved it “to prevent the device from causing harm to the safety of navigation and personnel of passing vessels.”
In fact, China’s ships had over a long period tailed the USNS Bowditch, an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance vessel. The American crew, who at the time were trying to retrieve the drone, repeatedly radioed the Chinese sailors, who ignored their calls and, within 500 yards of the U.S. craft, went into the water in a small boat to seize it. The Chinese by radio told the Bowditch they were keeping the drone.
The site of the seizure, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, was so close to the shoreline of the Philippines that it was beyond China’s expansive “nine-dash line” claim. There was absolutely no justification for the Chinese navy to grab the drone. The intentional taking of what the Defense Department termed a “sovereign immune vessel” of the United States showed that Beijing thought it was not bound by any rules of conduct.
Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.
The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing’s unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.
China has been called a “trivial state,” one which seeks nothing more than “perpetuation of the regime itself and the protection of the county’s territorial integrity.” This view fundamentally underestimates the nature of the Chinese challenge. China, under Xi Jinping, has become a revolutionary regime that seeks not only to dominate others but also take away their sovereignty.
Xi at this moment cannot compel others to accept his audacious vision of a China-centric world, but he has put the world on notice.
These events together mean, once again, that Carter has failed to understand a hardline regime. In his op-ed, he warns America against starting “a modern Cold War” with China. Washington, in reality, cannot start anything. There already is a struggle that Xi Jinping has made existential.
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- AI Program Taught Itself How To 'Cheat' Its Human Creators
When most people think about the potential risks of artificial intelligence and machine learning, their minds immediately jump to “the Terminator” – a future where robots, according to a dystopian vision once articulated by Elon Musk, would march down suburban streets, gunning down every human in their path.
But in reality, while AI does have the potential to sow chaos and discord, the manner in which this might happen is much more pedestrian, and far less exciting than a real-life “Skynet”. If anything, risks could arise from AI networks that can create fake images and videos – known in the industry as “deepfakes” – that are indistinguishable from the real think.
Who could forget this video of President Obama? This never happened – it was produced by AI software – but it’s almost indistinguishable from a genuine video.
Well, in the latest vision of AI’s capabilities in the not-so-distant future, a columnist at TechCrunch highlighted a study that was presented at a prominent industry conference back in 2017. In the study, researchers explained how a Generative Adversarial Network – one of the two common varieties of machine learning agents – defied the intentions of its programmers and started spitting out synthetically engineered maps after being instructed to match aerial photographs with their corresponding street maps.
The intention of the study was to create a tool that could more quickly adapt satellite images into Google’s street maps. But instead of learning how to transform aerial images into maps, the machine-learning agent learned how to encode the features of the map onto the visual data of the street map.
The intention was for the agent to be able to interpret the features of either type of map and match them to the correct features of the other. But what the agent was actually being graded on (among other things) was how close an aerial map was to the original, and the clarity of the street map.
So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn’t notice, but that the computer can easily detect.
In fact, the computer is so good at slipping these details into the street maps that it had learned to encode any aerial map into any street map! It doesn’t even have to pay attention to the “real” street map — all the data needed for reconstructing the aerial photo can be superimposed harmlessly on a completely different street map, as the researchers confirmed:
The agent’s actions represented an inadvertent breakthrough in the capacity for machines to create and fake images.
This practice of encoding data into images isn’t new; it’s an established science called steganography, and it’s used all the time to, say, watermark images or add metadata like camera settings. But a computer creating its own steganographic method to evade having to actually learn to perform the task at hand is rather new. (Well, the research came out last year, so it isn’t new new, but it’s pretty novel.)
Instead of finding a way to complete a task that was beyond its abilities, the machine learning agent developed its own way to cheat.
One could easily take this as a step in the “the machines are getting smarter” narrative, but the truth is it’s almost the opposite. The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting. This could be avoided with more stringent evaluation of the agent’s results, and no doubt the researchers went on to do that.
And if even these sophisticated researchers nearly failed to detect this, what does that say about our ability to differentiate genuine images from those that were fabricated by a computer simulation?
- Monetary Policy 'Reset': From Rhetoric To Actuality
A resurgence in nationalistic tendencies has been predominately associated with the advents of Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency. But have these outcomes meant that we now neglect to give due consideration to the years that preceded the supposed breakdown of the ‘rules based global order‘?
It was in Davos at the 2013 World Economic Forum – three years before the UK voted to leave the European Union – that IMF head Christine Lagarde warned an audience of bankers and economists of the dangers of renewed protectionism:
If we look at openness, and we see that the situation is improving, you can be absolutely sure that nations will revert to their natural tendency of hiding behind their borders, of moving toward protectionism, of listening to vested interest and will forget about transcending those national priorities. It is not the way to go.
Of paramount importance, according to Lagarde, was the removal of barriers, particularly in terms of global trade. By observing the climate in the present day, trade has become a central pillar of geopolitical disorder in the manner of ‘Trump’s Trade War‘ with China and the potential for supply chains between the UK and the EU to be compromised in the wake of Brexit.
In 2014, Lagarde returned to Davos to speak to delegates about something she called ‘reset‘. Keep in mind at this point that the world was still over two years away from Brexit and Trump’s ascension to power. There had yet to be any discernible rise in what is today characterised throughout the media as ‘populism‘.
Sharing a platform with Bank of England governor Mark Carney and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, Lagarde explained what this reset would entail in regards to monetary policy.
We see as necessary going forward a reset in the area of monetary policies. We believe that quantitative easing and the accommodating monetary policies that have been adopted should be continued up until such point that growth is well anchored in those economies.
Once it is well anchored then those accommodating policies have to be reformulated, have to move either back into their old territories or be more traditional, or be, maybe, of a different kind.
A further two facets to the ‘reset‘ would be the reform of the financial sector and regulatory environment via Basel III (which runs through the Bank for International Settlements), and structural reforms of global economies that would encompass product markets, service markets and emerging markets.
In an interview with Bloomberg during the 2014 World Economic Forum, Lagarde expanded on her definition of a ‘reset‘. Her message was clear: without cooperation between nations, the reset would most likely be fraught with instability and market turbulence. Governments would have to implement ‘growth friendly measures‘ in order to secure ‘jobs rich growth‘.
Behind national governments sit the central banks, who Lagarde said would begin a gradual process of reversing six years of ‘unconventional‘ monetary policy methods. This would later become widely known as ‘normalisation‘.
At the time of Lagarde’s interview, the Federal Reserve had just begun to taper their asset purchasing scheme (quantitative easing), which was introduced in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers collapsing. By the end of 2014, the Fed had ended the scheme entirely. A year later, in December 2015, they began to raise interest rates – the first rise in over a decade.
It was not until December 2016 – after Donald Trump was confirmed as the next President – that the Fed accelerated its programme of ‘normalising‘ rates. This has since expanded to the bank rolling off assets from its balance sheet – a process called ‘balance sheet normalisation‘.
Altogether, the Fed have raised rates seven times since the December 2016 hike, and so far have rolled off over $400 billion in assets from their balance sheet.
Outside of America, the Bank of England have also begun to raise rates amidst the UK preparing to leave the EU. The European Central Bank announced in December 2018 that as of the new year, they would cease their bond buying facility, having gradually tapered the programme over a two year period.
Nearly five years after Christine Lagarde first spoke of the need for a ‘reset‘ of global monetary policy, three of the most influential central banks in the world are all engaged in the practice, albeit at varying speeds.
What began as rhetoric has been reinforced with concrete actions. As much as Lagarde and the IMF may have warned against ‘a rising tide of inward-looking nationalism‘ (and continues to do so), there is no doubt that such mechanisms have assisted in the ‘reset‘ of monetary policies.
How so? It quickly becomes apparent when reading through central bank communications that of primary concern to them now is their mandate for 2% annual inflation. The Fed is raising rates in part under the proviso of containing ‘inflationary pressures‘, whilst the Bank of England’s two rate hikes since the original EU referendum have been motivated by inflation breaching the 2% level due to a sustained devaluation of sterling.
As you would expect, the IMF fully endorses the current trend of monetary policy. The communique from the thirty-eighth meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee in October 2018 stated that where inflation was ‘close to or above target‘, central banks should tighten policy.
I have argued in separate articles that the actions stemming from Brexit and Donald Trump – far from being to the detriment of globalists – do in fact work in their favour.
The ‘reset‘ of monetary policy works primarily as a vehicle for the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements to position themselves as the beneficiaries of the inevitable economic downturn that will ensue.
As I will be exploring in an upcoming series of articles, the IMF are agitating to reform their quota subscriptions (the institution’s prime source of funding) and in turn the weighting of their Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies.
Conditions in the global economy – namely rising trade protectionism that pits the United States and China into economic conflict – has put the world reserve status of the dollar in increased jeopardy. For the IMF to achieve their goals, the dominance of the dollar as the payment of choice throughout global trade must not only be jeopardized. It must ultimately be dismantled, so as to gradually move the world nearer to the globalist utopia of assimilating national currencies through the SDR with the aim of creating a digitised global currency.
I believe that China’s inclusion in the IMF’s SDR basket in 2016 – just weeks before Donald Trump was chosen as the next U.S. president – marked the next significant stage of this process.
- Murders In Washington, D.C. Jump 40% In 2018
As of December 2018, 160 people had been murdered across the Washington metropolitan area, up from 116 in 2017, a spike of about 40%, according to new data from the Metropolitan Police Department.
In total, of the 534 people shot in the nation’s capital through mid-December, 23% died, reported The Washington Post.
Out of control murders had been visible since the first half of 2018. In response, Mayor Muriel Bowser had to deploy additional officers in Spring to get ahead of the crime wave – traditionally in the summer months, to wards 7 and eight that had been experiencing spikes in violent crime. By early summer, Police Chief Peter Newsham said the region already experienced a 41% surge in homicides year over year.
“Just like when we had a spike in shootings and violence in 2015, we got all the agencies of the government coordinated to respond. We were able to drive that crime down then and we will do it again,” Bowser said during a Ward 4 “crime walk” in May, during which she spoke with residents about their crime concerns.
“We’re going to stop this little uptick in violence. Investigators are making significant progress in some of the recent violent cases we’ve seen in our city, so you’re going to see, we’re going to end up having a good summer here in the District,” Newsham said during the same walk.
By August, there had been 100 homicides in the District, compared to just 74 at the same time in 2017. One month later, there had been more people killed than all of 2017, with three months left in 2018.
City officials blamed the uptick in violence on illegal guns in the District. At a press conference in September, Newsham admitted that the current penalties for possession of an illegal weapon did not seem to be an effective deterrent. “The consequences of illegal firearm possession in our city is not changing the behavior. We’re arresting sometimes the same folks over and over again for carrying illegal firearms in the city,” he said.
Homicides in the District have been on a roller coaster over the last two decades, from a high of 262 in 2002 to a low of 88 in 2012. Now it seems that the violent crime trend is back.
While homicides soared around the nation’s capital, killings were mostly down in other nearby metros.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, homicides dropped from 21 in 2017 to 19 in 2018, while in Fairfax County, Virginia, fatal shootings fell from 18 to 13 across the past two years.
Maryland’s Prince George’s County saw one of the most significant annual drops, going from 80 homicides in 2017 to 60 last year. In the Arlington, Virginia, murders went from four to just three in 2018.
However, in Baltimore’s case, where wealth inequality, vacant homes, and homicides plagued the dying city, murders topped 300 for the fourth consecutive year. The wave of violence began not long after the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody. That triggered massive riots across the city, where the murders and violent crime have surged ever since.
It is certainly odd that in the “greatest economy ever,” out of control homicides are surging across the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area, just a stone’s throw from the White House.
- Free Speech Crushed In Socialist Venezuela — Again
Authored by Onar Am via Liberty Nation,
The legacy media is mostly silent on the jailing of a German journalist in Venezuela…
The German Junge Freiheit journalist Billy Six has been arrested and charged for espionage in Venezuela. Reporters Without Borders (RFS) said that Venezuelan authorities are accusing Six of spying, rebellion, and “violating security zones.”
He faces up to 28 years in prison if found guilty.
Six, who is known for his center-right viewpoints, was investigating the consequences of socialism in the Latin-American failed nation. Gerardo Moron of Venezuelan NGO Espacio Publico explained that:
“Six was in Venezuela investigating drug trafficking activities, smuggling of fuel and strategic goods, human trafficking and even the exodus of Venezuelans — crimes and realities present in this part of Venezuela.”
According to Edward Six, father of the jailed journalist, the government is holding him on the grounds of a photo his son took of President Nicolás Maduro at a rally that allegedly proves that he was inside the security perimeter. Edward Six says his son denies this.
“He just was on the street. He talked to all these normal people. He asked them questions and put that on the internet.”
This is not the first time the brave reporter has got in trouble with authoritarian regimes. In December 2012, the Syrian army arrested him for entering the country illegally and held him for three months.
Freedom Of Speech
Journalists are often like canaries in the coal mine. They give an early warning about a society’s slide into totalitarianism. When freedom of speech disappears, it is a sign that someone is maintaining power not based on competence, but on oppression. Shining the light of truth on the worthy only strengthens their position, but the corrupt are only be weakened by it.
Venezuela was held up as a beacon of progress by progressive socialists all over the West until only a few years ago, when the Bolivarian revolution transmuted into a nightmare where starving people are forced to eat garbage or their own pets in order to survive.
The left was quick to go silent, and far-fetched explanations were conjured to explain away yet another miserable failure of socialism. It was the low oil price, the capitalists were conspiring to destroy Venezuela, and Chavez was good, but Maduro is bad.
Six Versus Khashoggi
Consider the difference in Western press coverage of the killing of Islamic journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment of Six. On the former there has been massive reactions, but the legacy media has been almost silent on the German journalist.
Billy Six
Why? Billy Six was trying to tell the truth about socialism, the “progressive” ideas that always fail. That’s a story that is a turn-off for most of mainstream media. Khashoggi, by contrast, was a leftist darling because he was critical of an ally of the United States and moderate reformer of political Islam, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Never mind that Khashoggi was a radical Islamist, had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was possibly a mouthpiece of Iran. He was against the liberal freedoms of the West, and that makes him an ally of the illiberal left.
The legacy media has called President Donald Trump an authoritarian and fascist for labeling them as “the enemy of the people,” painting him as someone who would oppose free speech and imprison journalists. However, when reporters are actually jailed for merely doing their jobs, the fake news media remain indifferent. Their silence on the matter speaks volumes.
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