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Adem Duygu, a military analyst from Turkey, posted commercial satellite imagery of Russia’s new combat stealth drone on a flight line around the date President Vladimir Putin inspected the country’s latest warplanes at the 929th Chkalov State Flight-Test Center in Russia’s Astrakhan region.

Commenting on the latest satellite imagery, The National Interest said the new drone, dubbed the Sukhoi Okhotnik-B, or Hunter-B, a stealth heavy unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) being developed by Sukhoi as a sixth-generation aircraft, was first spotted by land-based cameras earlier this year at an airfield in Novosibirsk in southern Russia.

Duygu didn’t provide a date on when the satellite imagery was taken, but it’s likely the photo was snapped within the first two weeks of May. This is because, on May 14, Putin was escorted by six Sukhoi Su-57 stealth jets to Chkalov, for an immediate inspection of the flight line.

The satellite image of the flight line at the Chkalov State Flight-Test Center shows the Hunter-B, Su-57, Su-34, a MiG-29, and multiple Sukhoi Flanker variants.

In a planned statement surrounding the trip, Putin hardly mentioned the stealth drone: “In addition to the modern and advanced military aircraft and helicopters that were shown to us, unmanned aerial vehicles were presented,” Putin said. “I emphasize that all the activities in preparation for the serial production of this technology were performed on time.”

The National Interest doesn’t believe the Hunter-B will be ready for series production anytime soon.

Estimates show the Hunter-B is similar in size to China’s Tian Ying drone, the US Air Force’s RQ-170 Sentinel, and the US Navy’s X-47B UAV.

Tom Cooper, an independent expert on Russian military aviation, said the Hunter-B entering squadron service with the Russian Air Force is “big.”

“The Russian military is running multiple UAV-related projects,” Cooper said. “Thus the emergence of this project is perfectly normal.”

Samuel Bendett, an independent expert on the Russian military, said the Hunter-B could begin flight-testing in 2H19 if it hasn’t already done so.

“At this point, it is going to be heaviest and fastest UAV [in Russian service] if and when fielded, but additional testing and evaluation will have to take place in order for this unmanned system to be fully functional,” Bendett said. “Its speed [up to 620 miles per hour] and weight — up to 20 tons — means that a host of aerodynamic, electronic and high-tech issues need to be worked out.”

Besides the nuclear arms race between Russia and the US, both countries have been modernizing their militaries with new technologies, including developing new fifth-generation fighter jets, UCAVs, and hypersonic weapons. The world is on the cusp of a significant conflict, once global trade crashes and the world is thrown into a trade recession or even a depression, the probabilities of conflict will soar. According to the chart below, maybe that time is now.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VLznQh Tyler Durden

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Brexit has been a long, drawn-out saga. But finally, Theresa May’s indecision appears to be coming to an end. She has finally been cornered in a tragic opera with more twists and turns than Wagner’s Ring Cycle. May’s Götterdämmerung is reaching its conclusion. Brünnhilde is riding Grane, her trusty steed, into immolation on the funeral pyre of her heavily-amended withdrawal agreement.

Mrs May’s initial error was to seek consensus between Remainers and Brexiteers. In the words of one of her sacked advisers, Nick Timothy, she viewed Brexit as a damage-limitation exercise. Her mission statement evolved from her Lancaster House speech, when she declared she would deliver Brexit in terms which were clear, complying with the referendum and applauded by ardent Brexiteers. It became a fatally flawed compromise, which has failed to be ratified by MPs on three occasions so far, and a proposed fourth in the next week or so is likely to suffer the same fate.

Her problems started in earnest when she over-ruled her first Brexit secretary, David Davis. Unknown to her Brexit ministers, with her own civil service advisors she began negotiating behind her Brexit secretary’s back. Davis was informed of May’s Chequers proposal only a few days before that fateful Checkers meeting, following which Davis and Boris Johnson (Foreign Secretary) resigned from the Cabinet, while five other ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries also resigned.

If ever there was evidence that in politics you should keep your enemies close and your friends closer still, this was it. It has allowed those that have resigned to expose May’s duplicity to their fellow MPs and to organise the opposition to May’s Chequers proposal and the subsequent Withdrawal Agreement she cooked up with the EU.

Mrs May was always a Remainer, and her presence as Prime Minister has encouraged leading Europhiles to overturn the Brexit referendum. That is why she sees it as a damage limitation exercise: produce something that can be said to be Brexit, but still leaves the UK tied to Brussels. It is Hotel California, with Britain only leaving if both sides agree to it, or alternatively, Northern Ireland remains in the EU’s customs union. That cannot happen, not least because the DUP would end its vital support for May’s minority government.

Putting the Northern Ireland issue to one side, in order to get the agreement of the other EU nations for a full and final exit, the UK relies on “The duty of good faith which prohibits the deliberateexploitation of the implementation period to damage British interests” (Barclay’s emphasis). This was written in a letter by Steve Barclay, the current Brexit Secretary, to John Redwood, a senior Conservative backbench MP, in response to his concerns over the Withdrawal Agreement.

Good faith in politics? Barclay must be joking. Spain has a political interest in securing Gibraltar: won’t a future Spanish politician not be tempted to only agree to opening the door to Hotel California if Gibraltar is signed over? French fisherman enjoy free access to British fishing grounds. What French politician has the resolve to stand up to striking fisherman on a good-faith commitment? We haven’t seen one yet.

In short, May’s attempt to limit Brexit damage is a stitch-up, pleasing neither side of the House.

The established legal position

The EU Withdrawal Act 2018 (not to be confused with May’s proposed Withdrawal Agreement) sets the terms for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. Its first clause is the repeal on Exit Day of the EU Communities Act 1972, by which the UK joined the then Common Market. It is primary legislation and cannot be overturned. As Stewart Jackson, who was involved with its drafting put it, you cannot wish away the EU Referendum Act 2015, the EU (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 and EU Withdrawal Act 2018 on a whim.

You wouldn’t think so, judging by the back-tracking of the Remainers in Parliament. David Davis and Stewart Jackson knew that “Remainer refuseniks would use every low and disreputable trick in the book to disavow the settled will of the electorate in 2016”. They drafted the legislation with this in mind. The fact of the matter is no one can block No Deal.

Press reporting has skated over this fact. The BBC and other media outlets take most of their briefing from those who are wishing away the law. It has confined Mrs May in her attempts to get her withdrawal agreement through the House: all she has been able to do is postpone Exit Day with the EU’s agreement, the date when legislation comes into force. In the absence of any agreement the UK will leave on WTO terms on Exit Day, currently 31 October.

Labour’s role in all this

In desperation, Mrs May has turned to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to gain sufficient support to push her Withdrawal Agreement through the House against the wishes of her own MPs. Corbyn is a Marxist, as is his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell. Both of them have promoted far-left activists, who now have a high degree of control over both party policy and the selection of Labour MPs, meaning that moderates are being side-lined and expunged.

This creates Labour’s own crisis, with Marxist activists alienating moderate Labour voters in the constituencies. Furthermore, the Parliamentary Labour Party has its own split between Remainers and Brexiteers. The whole Brexit issue is a hot potato with which the Labour leadership would rather not be involved. It was with this in mind the Labour leadership held talks with Mrs May’s government, at her invitation, to try to find common ground.

Labour’s tactics were simple, only an increasingly desperate Prime Minister seemed unable to see them. Labour took and kept the moral high ground, appearing reasonable by accepting the invitation to talks. They ensured they would go nowhere (not difficult, given Mrs May’s stubbornness), then withdraw blaming her for the breakdown. Their hope is to force a general election following a No Confidence Motion only after Brexit has been resolved, capitalising on Mrs May’s disastrous handling of the Brexit issue. And if Mrs May brings her proposed withdrawal agreement to the House for a fourth time, they almost certainly won’t support it, again blaming Mrs May for her “failure to listen”.

The Labour leadership will be observing with interest the battle to succeed her, and it will be clear to them that either No Deal or a compromise in that direction will be the result. This is unlikely to worry them on two counts. Firstly, Labour will not want to alienate voters in their northern constituencies any further by compromising on Mrs May’s deal or anything close to it. And secondly, the leadership, being committed Marxists, will probably take the view that a “right-wing” Prime Minister will improve their own prospects in a general election.

It all points to a continuing strategy of not supporting Mrs May, avoiding any deal with the Conservatives, and hoping the Conservatives will elect a leader that will destroy the Conservatives’ electoral prospects.

The EU elections

This article will be published on the day Britain votes in the EU elections. Britain will be returning 73 Members of the European Parliament in a vote that was never meant to take place.

By extending Exit Day to 31 October, Mrs May has forced this election upon herself. She has made herself extremely unpopular with Brexiteers, and anyone who expected Brexit to be delivered in accordance with the 2016 referendum result. In effect, she has stood in the way of a democratic vote. It is a stance which has exposed the British Parliament as being dominated by career politicians who have become divorced from their electors and undemocratic in their outlook. This behaviour from the Conservatives and prevarication by Labour has seriously undermined electoral support for both parties.

Consequently, Nigel Farage, who can claim much of the original credit for Brexit, has re-entered the fray. He has positioned himself with a new party (the Brexit Party), sanitised of perceived extremism, but combining candidates from all backgrounds. It is politically neutral but with a simple message: get democracy back. From a standing start in about a month, the Brexit Party has gone up in the polls ahead of all the other parties by a substantial margin. Meanwhile, in the polls the Conservatives have slumped into single percentage figures. The election may turn out to be close to a whitewash for them.

You can tell the establishment is worried, when they send the Electoral Commission around to look at the Brexit Party’s books in the hope that some impropriety can be identified. Furthermore, the EU has all of a sudden decided to examine Farage’s finances. These moves by biased establishments are so obviously muck-raking, they could end up strengthening support for Farage and his Brexit Party even more.

The likely effect on the more supine Tory MPs should be to wake them up to the fact that Mrs May must go as soon as possible and be replaced by someone who will not only deliver a proper Brexit but neutralise Farage’s Brexit party. Nothing less will suffice, and the announcement of her amended withdrawal agreement on Tuesday undermines her position even further.

The selection process, in theory anyway, starts with Conservative MPs voting for any candidate who cares to stand. If necessary, a second round of voting takes place, those that have dropped out lending their support, along with many of the votes of their supporters to one of the remaining candidates. The two leading candidates in a final ballot are then put forward to the constituency members for a final selection. It should be completed by end-June.

Mrs May’s likely replacement

At the time of writing, it appears that Mrs May will fail disastrously if she puts her amended withdrawal agreement to a Commons vote for a fourth time. She has tried to appeal to the Remainers with a fourth vote by offering a possible second referendum if MPs back her bill. She has now broken every red line she previously set out. She may not even get the chance for it to be voted.

In the coming days, her position will surely become untenable, though we have all said that before. But this time, she will have exhausted every possibility and have nowhere else to go. And if the Conservative vote collapses in today’s European elections, the fence-sitters in Parliament will be galvanised into getting rid of her.

In the last few days, leadership contenders have been lining up their bids for the premiership. Those jostling for position are talking of everything but Brexit. The Remainers, such as Philip Hammond (the Chancellor) do not appear to be in the race and have become so unpopular outside Parliament that they wouldn’t get a mandate from the constituencies anyway. The next leader is very likely to be a staunch Brexiteer.

It would bore an international audience to list and analyse the runners, other than to concentrate on the clear favourite, Boris Johnson, who currently shows as 7/4-on. His nearest rival, Dominic Raab is 9/2-against. The news on Boris is for him both good and tricky. The good is that he is clearly the favourite with the constituency members, and if he can be one of the two names put forward, he should be home and dry. The tricky bit is Remainer MPs and fence-sitters in the parliamentary party, who claim to be one-nation Tories, would rather not support Boris.

He is regarded as right-wing, when in fact he favours freer markets, less regulation, and free trade. He is a classic Tory. It is the party’s middle ground that has become socialistic. In an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph he wrote the following:

“What we cannot now know – as the great French economist Bastiat observed in the 19th century – is the unseen opportunity cost of the way the UK economic structure has evolved to fit the EU over the last four and a half decades, and the productive ways in which it might now evolve.”

The reference to Frédéric Bastiat is important. He is referring to Bastiat’s parable of the broken window, which points out that the state’s intervention (the boy who broke the window) denies the more productive use of the baker’s money to his desired ends. The fact that Johnson knows the parable and understands the message is good evidence of his libertarian credentials.

That being the case, it is the socialistic element of the Conservative parliamentary party, masquerading as one-nation Tories, that he has to overcome. Reportedly, he has been having one-to-one meetings with his fellow MPs to do just that. Sometime ago, there was a well-founded belief that if Johnson became leader of the Conservative Party at least five MPs would resign the whip. Since then, Change UK, a dustbin of disillusioned Remainers has been formed with eleven MPs, three of which were Conservatives. It has been a complete failure and a sharp lesson to other would-be jumpers, so there are likely to be no more defections on a Johnson leadership.

Johnson has also been taking the advice of Lynton Crosby, probably the most successful political strategist today. It was Crosby who advised Scott Morrison in last weekend’s Australian election, when the expected Labour opposition victory was successfully overturned. He also advised Johnson in his successful elections as Mayor of London in 2008 and 2012.

This is interesting, because Johnson appears to be working to a carefully constructed plan. He avoids press comment over Brexit and writes about anything else in his Monday column at the Daily Telegraph. His contributions in Parliament have been brief, the few on Brexit generally confined to democracy rather than trade. He has positioned himself to rescue the party from electoral destruction if called upon, rather than appear to be an overtly ambitious politician, unlike all the other contenders. It is quite Churchillian, in the sense there is a parallel with Churchill’s election by his peers to lead the nation in its darkest hour. He even wrote about it in a recent bestseller, The Churchill Factor, and understands intimately what it took for Churchill to gain the support of the House.

It is therefore hardly surprising Johnson is the favourite to succeed Mrs May. His appreciation of free markets means he is not frightened by trading with the EU on WTO terms. Furthermore, President Trump admires him, and would be likely to fast-track a US trade deal with the UK. However, Johnson is likely to pursue a deal on radically different terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis with no further extensions to Exit Day.

As soon as the 31 October deadline has passed, Remainers will no longer have a cause. They have yet to appreciate the fact, and they may vote for him in the hope that after restoring the party’s fortunes, they can get rid of him and mend relations with the EU. But the Brexit debate would effectively end after Exit Day and its divisiveness with it. Farage’s Brexit party will wither on the vine, its purpose of restoring democratic accountability to Parliament and delivering Brexit being restored.

Johnson would then have the task of rebuilding the party for the next general election, set for 5 May 2022.

In the coming days, having seen Mrs May’s last roll of the dice, all these factors will be uppermost in the minds of both backbenchers and of government ministers in their private capacity. If there is one thing that is certain, the Conservative Party is a survivor. If Boris Johnson is the best option, MPs will swallow their prejudices and elect him.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JDk9uW Tyler Durden

Even with the 90 day delay, the Trump administration’s decision to blacklist Huawei and other foreign telecoms suspected of threatening national security has already prompted a handful of suppliers to cut ties with the Chinese telecoms giant, for fear that continuing to do business with Huawei would subject them to retaliation from the US.

Three British companies, mobile network operators EE and Vodafone, as well as semiconductor maker ARM, have already said they would end their business relationships with Huawei (EE and Vodafone said they wouldn’t offer Huawei phones on its 5G network, and ARM told employees to tear up all contracts with Huawei). 

With all of the pressure on Huawei, Beijing is again resorting to threats to try and preserve Huawei’s business. The UK reviews its telecoms policy to determine whether Huawei will be allowed to supply ‘non-core’ 5G components, like antenna masts, Beijing would like UK bureaucrats to know that there will be consequences if they shun Huawei.

Top Chinese diplomat Chen Wen, the Charge D’affairs in London, told the BBC that China would scale back its investments in the UK if Huawei is excluded from its 5G network, according to the BBC.

Though she kept her comments vague, Wen told the BBC that the backlash would be “quite substantial.” This at a time when Brexit-related uncertainty is already complicating decisions relating to capex and FDI.

Speaking to the BBC’s World at One programme, Ms Chen, who is the Chinese Charge D’affairs in London, said the UK economy would be damaged by the message any ban on Huawei sent out to international and Chinese companies.

“The message is not going to be very positive,” she said.

“Is UK still open? Is UK still extending a welcoming arm to other Chinese investors?”

When asked how large the repercussions would be, the embassy official said: “It’s hard to predict at the moment, but I think it’s going to be quite substantial.”

Chen added that the Chinese government would never ask a domestic company to spy on its customers, before accusing President Trump of stoking ”hysteria”.

Ms Chen insisted that her government would never force a Chinese firm operating abroad to provide information to its intelligence agencies.

She went on to claim that there was a bit of “hysteria” in the United States about the rise of Chinese influence and the UK should make decisions based on its own national interest.

She called Huawei’s investment in the UK “a vote of confidence in the UK economy.”

As convincing as Beijing’s “no spying” pledge might sound, the notion that Huawei won’t spy on its customers isn’t just specious – it’s demonstrably false. Who can forget the suspicious ‘back doors’ discovered in Huawei’s networking equipment, or the suspicious ‘back doors’ discovered in its consumer-tech products. 

With this in mind, it looks like the UK is facing a choice: Either grant Beijing ingress to its communications networks, or risk losing that China money.

Whatever they decide, the world will be watching closely to see if this is the start of a trend of European countries finally coming around to Washington’s line on Huawei.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HOvODW Tyler Durden

Authored by Andrew Spannaus via ConsortiumNews.com,

In 2016, the world began to change, with the Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. In both cases, an insurrection of “regular people” against the structures of political and media power upset the political balance of two of the leading countries of the Western world.

And the revolt didn’t stop there. It continued in 2017 and 2018 with a series of elections across continental Europe that saw the growth of protest movements and candidates willing to challenge the system of globalization that until recently seemed inevitable.

The anti-establishment revolt that has spread across the Western world is closely linked to the gradual transformation of the economic structure of the nations on both sides of the Atlantic over a period of decades, from one focused principally on production, to a system based increasingly on finance.

“Wall Street bubbles – Always the same.” 1901 cartoon depicting financier J. P. Morgan as a bull with eager investors.(Puck via Wikimedia Commons)

Finance has always had a role, of course, and speculative bubbles have often led to crashes and depressions in various periods of history. The characteristic of the shift over the past half-century is that of a structural change that despite provoking a series of crises, has not been effectively addressed. The result has been a widespread increase in inequality, interlinked with stagnation or even a decrease of purchasing power and living standards for a considerable portion of the population. This doesn’t mean that people don’t have more stuff nowadays, due to new digital technologies for example, they do. But most have to work more now, with more uncertainty, to make a decent living.

Speculative Financial Attacks

The mechanisms of the globalized financial economy have brought profound change in the international political sphere as well. Speculative movements have become a form of pressure under which countries can be brought to their knees, as national governments are no longer able to think of their own citizens’ interests in the face of a financial attack. Some might say that in the long run the markets are generally right, i.e. capital movements tend to reward or punish countries based on the quality of their economic policies. This ideological, tautological position is easily unmasked with reference to any number of speculative bubbles, from that of the “Asian Tigers” in the 1990s to the debt bubbles of Argentina and Russia in the 2000s; the pursuit of immediate profits in the name of shareholder value often means ignoring economic fundamentals, and exploiting misperceptions despite their lack of justification being fairly obvious to a reasonable observer.

The problem is not the existence of financial markets per se, but rather the role they have been given in determining economic policy, de facto shifting the aims of policymakers from the pursuit of the general welfare to the appeasement of investors in a model whose goals are generally not aligned with the long-term needs of the population.

The discontent produced by this process has now boiled over; and predictably, the targets of the protest are not only the executives who exploit the revolving door between finance and government (of which there have been many). A broader opposition has developed, a cultural revolt that mixes multiple factors associated with the same process. In the case of globalization there is no denying that many changes have been due not to some inevitable process of upheaval ultimately leading to progress. Rather, numerous Western industries have been uprooted in order to exploit weak labor and environmental regulations in countries that were desperate for investment. Political decisions were made to further this process, essentially disregarding the long-term effects they would have on the workforce in developed nations.

Yellow Vest protesters in France, Jan. 12, 2019. (Pascal Maga via Flickr)

The defenders of globalization say that people have to be ready to adapt to this process, yet when adaptation means seeing a worsening of one’s standard of living, accompanied by a loss of social cohesion, it’s not surprising that frustration and discontent grow over time.

Immigration

Another major issue that has emerged in this context is, of course, immigration. A strong reaction has developed among conservatives in particular, but has expanded to have a general effect beyond those who would normally be considered xenophobic or racist. In many countries, right-wing populists have used immigration as one of their major issues in criticizing globalization. The notion that the disappearance of borders means that people should be able to go wherever they wish, has fed into fears of a rapid change in the identity of Western European countries in particular, in both economic and social terms.

There is no denying the centrality of the issue of immigration, yet it is political malpractice not to recognize how it is linked to the overall reaction to globalization, starting in the economic sphere. The insecurity people feel due to more difficult living conditions feeds a fear of immigrants, who are seen as a threat to economic well-being. If immigrants are willing to accept lower pay and less comfortable living conditions, it is not hard to see how that can put downward pressure on the living standards of others.

Disastrous Wars

A third key issue is foreign policy. While the notion of free markets has been used to promote neoliberal economic policies, the defense of human rights has been proclaimed as the justification for a series of disastrous wars. President Barack Obama made great use of Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness to win the Democratic primaries in 2008, only to later be pushed into another regime-change war a few years later, in Libya. Donald Trump went further, decrying the “$6 trillion wasted in the Middle East” that could have been used to “rebuild our country.” This attack on the so-called shared values of the international liberal order struck a strong chord in U.S. citizens tired of endless conflict, making a connection between a failed foreign policy and economic decline. The effects were felt in Europe as well, in particular as regards a potential shift in the Western stance towards Russia.

Protest in Minneapolis, April 2, 2011, against U.S. military intervention in Libya. (Fibonnaci Blue via Flickr)

Little Progress

In the United States, while pundits concentrate on the tone of the political/public debate as it is affected by Trump’s style, there is little progress on addressing the long-term process that has brought us to this point. Yes, there has been economic growth, and even an uptick in manufacturing jobs, yet the middle and lower classes in the United States still struggle to make ends meet, while younger workers in particular suffer from uncertainty regarding their future. Ignoring this reality, claiming that whoever still feels an aversion to the mainstream narrative regarding the economic and political conditions of the country, merely strengthens the disconnect between different segments of the population. Fortunately for the Democratic Party, in the 2018 mid-terms most candidates decided to concentrate on pocketbook issues, starting with healthcare, rather than trumpeting the cause of the resistance against the “deplorables,” the term used by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The similarity with the political situation in Europe is obvious. For years the political and media establishment branded any anti-European Union positions as being inherently racist and reactionary, simply feeding the perception that the institutions were out of touch with the demands of a significant portion of the population. From the Netherlands to France, from Germany to Italy, populist parties have all drawn on opposition to globalization and austerity to grow their support, often — but not always — mixed in with criticism of increased immigration. Despite the different political systems, the issues are so similar to those in the United States that it is hard to deny a connection, or to reduce the popular reaction to one based only on racism or fear of others.

Given the parallels between the situations in Europe and the United States, the only practicable remedy is also quite evident: either political institutions begin to deal seriously with the fundamental economic changes that have taken place over a period of decades, or nobody should expect the revolt of the voters to subside, with all of the negative side effects seen to this point. And there is no doubt things could get even worse, in Europe in particular, where the last cases of dictatorship and destruction of democratic institutions are not so far in the past.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WhTYA7 Tyler Durden

Starting in September, residents of Xi’an, located in China’s northwest Shaanxi Province, will receive negative social credit points if they refuse to observe local garbage sorting regulations, according to the CCP-friendly Global Times. 

The Xi’an government requires its residents to sort their waste into at least four categories – recyclable, hazardous waste, kitchen and other waste. Those who refuse to fulfill the obligation will be recorded under the personal credit system or will be fined up to 200 yuan ($28). –Global Times

“Residents are forbidden from mixing industrial solid waste, construction waste, medical waste and animal carcasses in household garbage. Each residential area should have at least one “recyclable” and one “hazardous waste” collection container, the regulation says.” 

China’s social credit system is a technological behemoth of oppression – used to regulate public behavior with the goal of punishing people into compliance. People with great social credit will get “green channel” benefits while those who violate laws will be punished with restrictions and penalties.

Hangzhou, the capital city of China’s Zhejiang province, rolled out its social credit system earlier last year, rewarding “pro-social behaviors” such as blood donations, healthy lifestyles, and volunteer work while punishing those who violate traffic laws, smoke and drink, and speak poorly about government. 

According to a February report, Chinese officials collected 14.21 million pieces of information of “untrustworthy conduct” by both business and individuals – including failure to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, swindling customers, and – for individuals, acts such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals, SCMP reports. 

Meanwhile, around 17.46 million people who are “discredited” were prevented from buying plane tickets, while 5.47 million were disallowed from purchasing tickets to China’s high-speed train system. 

Tracking of individual behavior in China, meanwhile, has become more accessible to the government with apps such as Tencent’s WeChat and And Financial’s Alipay – a central point for making payments, obtaining loans and organizing transport. These accounts are linked to mobile phone numbers, which in turn require government IDs.

Other technologies, including social media, facial recognition, smartphones, artificial intelligence and smart cameras will play a critical role in this Orwellian strategy for social compliance. 

In the next few years, every action of a citizen will leave a permanent digital fingerprint that the government will either assign a good or bad score based on how they view the action. 

And now, if residents of Xi’an fail to properly sort their trash, they will be docked social credit points or fined. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2K2bjqi Tyler Durden

via South Front,

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called “globalization” which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many “emerging markets” created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand.

However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating—and bursting—several financial “bubbles”.

Even today’s US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial “black swan” event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal “firepower” on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply “more of the same.” It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy.

The Once and Future Multipolar System?

While the 1944 Bretton Woods conference sought to re-establish a global economic order that was destroyed in the Great Depression, the formation of the United Nations served a rather different aim. The UN Security Council, with five veto-wielding permanent members, meant that for as long as these five countries abided by its rules, there would be five spheres of influence and therefore also five relatively exclusive economic zones. British leaders in 1945, for example, hardly desired the dissolution of their empire; records of wartime discussions between FDR and Churchill show the two clashed repeatedly over the tariff barriers separating British colonial possessions from international trade.  That which became known as the “Iron Curtain” was a feature, not a bug, of that system—Churchill himself wanted one for his empire, after all. However, is the apparent multi-polar system of today any more viable than the one which appeared to emerge after 1945?

“We have always been at war with Eurasia”

The post-WW2 multipolar world did not come to pass because the French and British empires collapsed and its newly independent states became aligned with either the United States or the USSR, and the PRC was in no shape to exert much power outside of its own borders since it was recovering from decades of civil war and foreign occupation. Seven decades after WW2’s conclusion, however, one can readily see that the era of US and European economic dominance is giving way to a multipolar world in which Russia and China are once again capable of standing up for their economic interests.

However, a return to genuine multipolarity does not appear very likely. Russia and China need each other too much to risk conflict by pursuing their own separate and mutually exclusive economic spheres of influence. Rather, we can expect a gradual merger of the two. When it comes to the US and the EU, the situation is slightly more complicated.

Welcome to Oceania, Citizen

While George Orwell imagined the future of Russia (Eurasia) and China (Eastasia) as imperial entities unintegrated with one another, a prediction that does not appear to be coming true, the establishment of Oceania, governed from the United States and UK playing the role of “Airstrip One” seems to be looming every closer. Only the status of Europe remains unclear at this point.

The European Union is still unfit to shoulder world power responsibilities, it has barely weathered the last economic crisis, and the next one could easily be the final nail in its coffin. It certainly does not help that the United States is attempting to thoroughly economically dominate the European Union in order to deal with its own economic problems. Reducing European exports to the US and expanding US energy exports to the EU is very high on the list of White House priorities, to the point of risking trade war. Europe’s behavior following the US unilateral JCPOA withdrawal shows that the Europeans are incapable to oppose US power, even if it means defending important economic interests.

On the other hand, and in response to the Trump administration increasingly brazen attempts to subjugate Europe in political and economic terms, Germany and France are pursuing efforts to establish a solid EU “core”. This “core” would boast a European army, a concept whose popularity has grown in recent years, and be capable of collective action in the event of a crisis even if it means shedding the less well integrated eastern and southern EU members or at least relegating them to second-class status. However, it remains to be seen whether anything viable can be created before the next crisis topples the European house of cards and leads to power struggles over the political and economic alignment of the individual European states. As logical as developing a unified political and economic European may seem, it practice it is a very difficult idea to implement.

In theory, Germany, France, and Italy as well as other industrialized European states have the potential of becoming an independent force operating in the interests of their nations. In practice, this possibility has almost been lost. In the event of a confrontation with the Anglo-Saxon power center under conditions of difficult relations with Russia and intense struggle over markets with China and other “Asian Tigers” (Japan, ROK, Taiwan), Germany and other above-mentioned European powers lack potential for future economic expansion or even scientific and technological development. Their internal markets lack expansion potential, instead, they appear to be shrinking instead. Populations which produced the most value-added products are aging. The youth has been to a large extent replaced by newcomers who are not interested in industrial labor or hard work in general. These countries’ export capabilitiies are also limited.

On the other hand, if one considers the US competitors, we can readily see groups of actors whose elites have not consented to the roles being imposed upon them by the global elites. This is a heterogeneous group which cannot be termed to exist as a single bloc. National elites’ interests diverge significantly from, and often clash with those of the globalists to a certain degree and at different times. For example, Russian and Chinese national elites do not have identical economic interests. That which interests Chinese capital may be directly counter to the interests of Russian capital. The same is true for social questions. When it comes to Iran, the situation is more complicated still. Accordingly, the main problem of those who seek to compete or oppose the global dominion is that they lack a shared strategic vision and long-term coordinated position. They actions often have only localized significance.

Hybrid War Forever

Once that process of coalescence is complete, proxy wars will continue over certain parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, even Latin America, as key powers will struggle over vital markets and resources, using the full array of military, political, economic, cyber, and information weapons that we have seen used in Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, and Venezuela.

This hybrid warfare will be accompanied by a level of official propaganda that will make for example the current “Russiagate” reporting pale in comparison. However, at the same time, the rhetoric will be considerably more heated than the actual level of hostilities between the nuclear weapons-wielding states. Instead, that propaganda will be used to justify internal political censorship and repression, on a scale even greater than we have seen used against the Yellow Vests protests in France. 

Deprived of the ability to expand into ever new territories, the West will gradually sink into stagnation , poverty, and domestic disorder. At that point, the world will be in a state of a genuine bi-polar Cold War, a war of political and economic attrition whose outcome is currently impossible to predict.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2K10yEq Tyler Durden

Employees at social media giant Snap have been abusing internal tools for accessing user data in order to spy on Snapchat users, according to an investigative report by Motherboard, which interviewed multiple current and former employees and viewed internal Snap communications. 

“employees have used data access processes for illegitimate reasons to spy on users, according to two former employees.” –Motherboard

Snapchat, which boasts over 186 million users, is a mobile app for Android and iOS devices which allows people to send ‘self-destructing’ photos or videos to another person. The ‘snap’ can be set to expire within a few seconds of the receiver opening it, or the sender can elect not to delete it at all.

As such, the app has fueled an explosion in sexting – the exchange of sexually explicit messages over electronic devices, which has consequently led to legal trouble for those breaking the law. Earlier this month, five Fairfax County, VA students were hit with nine felony child porn charges and one charge for unlawful filming tied to a sexting case in which the students were trading naked pictures of female students over Snapchat. 

One of the tools Snap employees use to access sensitive user information, often for law enforcement purposes, is called SnapLion. Originally designed to comply with court orders and other valid law enforcement requests, SnapLion can reveal a user’s location data (when enabled) and message metadata, as well as photos or videos backed up by Snap users.

Snap’s publicly available guide to law enforcement for requesting information about users elaborates on the sort of data available from the company, including the phone number linked to an account; the user’s location data (such as when the user has turned on that setting on their phone and enabled location services on Snapchat); their message metadata, which may show who they spoke to and when; and in some cases limited Snap content, such as the user’s “Memories,” which are saved versions of their usually ephemeral Snaps, as well as other photos or videos the user backs-up. –Motherboard

According to the report, Snap’s entire “Spam and Abuse” team has access to the program according to one of the former employees, along with a department called “Customer Ops.” One current employee suggested that the tool is also used to combat bullying or harassment on the platform.

One of the former employees said that data access abuse occurred “a few times” at Snap. That source and another former employee specified the abuse was carried out by multiple individuals. A Snapchat email obtained by Motherboard also shows employees broadly discussing the issue of insider threats and access to data, and how they need to be combatted. –Motherboard

While Motherboard was able to view internal communications, the investigation “was unable to verify exactly how the data abuse occurred, or what specific system or process the employees leveraged to access Snapchat user data.“

You’ll just have to use your imagination – and always keep in mind that whatever you send over somebody else’s network is always subject to internal abuse. 

Leonie Tanczer, a lecturer in International Security and Emerging Technologies at University College London, said in an online chat this episode “really resonates with the idea that one should not perceive companies as monolithic entities but rather set together by individuals all who have flaws and biases of their own. Thus, it is important that access to data is strictly regulated internally and that there are proper oversights and checks and balances needed.” –Motherboard

“For the normal user, they need to understand that anything they’re doing that is not encrypted is, at some point, available to humans,” said former Facebook chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, who added that insider data access abuse ‘is not exceptionally rare.’

As Motherboard notes – that while Snap has taken measures to introduce strict access controls over user data, and takes abuse an user privacy very seriously, “the news highlights something that many users may forget: behind the products we use everyday there are people with access to highly sensitive customer data, who need it to perform essential work on the service.” 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JZQfQV Tyler Durden

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The co-founder of Skype, Jaan Tallinn, is on a desperate mission to save the human race from the destruction of artificial intelligence.  Since 2007, Tallinn’s dedicated more than $1 million toward preventing super-smart AIs from replacing humans as Earth’s dominant species and from destroying humanity in the process.

According to an interesting Popular Science article, the programmer discovered AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay “Staring into the Singularity” in 2007, two years after cashing in his Skype shares following the startup’s sale to eBay.  That’s when Tallinn started pouring money into the cause of saving humanity from AI.

So far, [Tallinn has] given more than $600,000 to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the nonprofit where Yudkowsky is a research fellow. He’s also given $310,000 to the University of Oxford’s Future of ­Humanity Institute, which PopSci quotes him as calling “the most interesting place in the universe.” –Futurism

It’s a lofty goal, and it may not be having much of an effect. Tallinn is strategic about his donations, however. He spreads his money among 11 organizations, each working on different approaches to AI safety, in the hope that one might stick. In 2012, he co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) with an initial outlay of close to $200,000.

Tallinn says that super-intelligent AI brings unique threats to the human race.

Ultimately, he hopes that the AI community might follow the lead of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1940s. In the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists realized what a destructive force nuclear weapons had become and joined together to try to limit further nuclear testing.

“The Manhattan Project scientists could have said, ‘Look, we are doing innovation here, and innovation is always good, so let’s just plunge ahead,’” he tells me.

“But they were more responsible than that.”

Tallinn says that we need to take responsibility for what we create and AI, once it reaches the singularity, has the potential to overpower and outsmart human beings.  If an AI is sufficiently smart, he explains, it might have a better understanding of the constraints placed on it than its creators do.

Imagine, he says, “waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind 5-year-olds.”

That is very likely what it could be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YKZMiW Tyler Durden