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Authored by Mohamed El-Erian via Project Syndicate,

The singular issue of Brexit has consumed the United Kingdom for two and a half years. The “if,” “how,” and “when” of the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, after decades of membership, has understandably dominated news coverage, and sidelined almost every other policy debate. Lost in the mix, for example, has been any serious discussion of how the UK should boost productivity and competitiveness at a time of global economic and financial fluidity.

At the same time, the rest of the world’s interest in Brexit has understandably waned. The UK’s negotiations with the EU have dragged on through multiple déjà vu moments, and the consensus is that the economic fallout will be felt far more acutely in Britain than in the EU, let alone in countries elsewhere.

Still, the rest of the world is facing profound challenges of its own. Political and economic systems are undergoing far-reaching structural changes, many of them driven by technology, trade, climate change, high inequality, and mounting political anger.

In addressing these issues, policymakers around the world would do well to heed the lessons of the UK’s Brexit experience.

When Britons voted by a margin of 51.9% to 48.1% to leave the EU, the decision came as a shock to experts, pundits, and Conservative and Labour Party leaders alike. They had underappreciated the role of “identity” as a driving force behind the June 2016 referendum. But now, voters’ deeply held ideas about identity, whether real or perceived, can no longer be dismissed. Though today’s disruptive politics are fueled by economic disappointment and frustration, identity is the tip of the spear. It has exposed and deepened political and social divisions that are as uncomfortable as they are intractable.

Experts also predicted that the UK economy would suffer an immediate and significant fall in output following the 2016 referendum. In the event, they misunderstood the dynamics of what economists call a “sudden stop” – that is, abrupt, catastrophic dysfunction in a key sector of the economy. A perfect example is the 2008 global financial crisis, when financial markets seized up as a result of operational dislocations and a loss of mutual confidence in the payments and settlement system.

Brexit was different. Because you cannot replace something with nothing, there was no immediate break in British-EU trade. In the absence of clarity on what type of Brexit would ultimately materialize, the economic relationship simply continued “as is,” and an immediate disruption was averted.

It turns out that when making macroeconomic and market projections for Brexit so far, “short versus long” has been more important than “soft versus hard” (with “hard” referring to the UK’s full, and most likely disorderly, withdrawal from the European single market and customs union). The question is not whether the UK will face a considerable economic reckoning, but when.

Nonetheless, the UK economy is already experiencing slow-moving structural change. There is evidence of falling foreign investment and this is contributing to the economy’s disappointing level of investment overall. Moreover, this trend is accentuating the challenges associated with weak productivity growth.

There are also signs that companies with UK-based operations have begun to trigger their Brexit contingency plans after a prolonged period of waiting, planning, and more waiting. In addition to shifting investments out of the UK, firms will also start to relocate jobs. And this process will likely accelerate even if British Prime Minister Theresa May manages to get her proposed exit deal through Parliament.

The Brexit process thus showcases the risks associated with economic and political fragmentation, and provides a preview of what awaits an increasingly fractured global economy if this continues: namely, less efficient economic interactions, less resilience, more complicated cross-border financial flows, and less agility. In this context, costly self-insurance will come to replace some of the current system’s pooled-insurance mechanisms. And it will be much harder to maintain global norms and standards, let alone pursue international policy harmonization and coordination.

Tax and regulatory arbitrage are likely to become increasingly common as well. And economic policymaking will become a tool for addressing national security concerns (real or imagined). How this approach will affect existing geopolitical and military arrangements remains to be seen.

Lastly, there will also be a change in how countries seek to structure their economies. In the past, Britain and other countries prided themselves as “small open economies” that could leverage their domestic advantages through shrewd and efficient links with Europe and the rest of the world. But now, being a large and relatively closed economy might start to seem more attractive. And for countries that do not have that option – such as smaller economies in East Asia – tightly knit regional blocs might provide a serviceable alternative.

The messiness of British party politics has made the Brexit process look like a domestic dispute that is sometimes inscrutable to the rest of the world. But Brexit holds important lessons for and about the global economy. Gone are the days when accelerating economic and financial globalization and correlated growth patterns went almost unquestioned. We are also in an era of considerable technological and political fluidity. The outlooks for growth and liquidity will likely become even more uncertain and divergent than they already are.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2AjwLR3 Tyler Durden

The UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation, according to The Telegraph, stating that any disclosure would “undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers.” 

Trump’s allies, however, are fighting back – demanding transparency and suggesting that the UK wouldn’t want the documents withheld unless it had something to hide. 

The Telegraph has talked to more than a dozen UK and US officials, including in American intelligence, who have revealed details about the row. 

British spy chiefs have “genuine concern” about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public, according to figures familiar with discussions.

“It boils down to the exposure of people”, said one US intelligence official, adding: “We don’t want to reveal sources and methods.” US intelligence shares the concerns of the UK. 

Another said Britain feared setting a dangerous “precedent” which could make people less likely to share information, knowing that it could one day become public. –The Telegraph

The Telegraph adds that the UK’s dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. haver been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also “been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president.” 

In September, we reported that the British government “expressed grave concerns” over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, “immediately” and “without redaction.” 

Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them. 

Mr Trump wants to declassify 21 pages from one of the applications. He announced the move in September, then backtracked, then this month said he was “very seriously” considering it again. Both Britain and Australia are understood to be opposing the move. 

Memos detailing alleged ties between Mr Trump and Russia compiled by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, were cited in the application, which could explain some of the British concern. –The Telegraph

I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release. Therefore, the Inspector General…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2018

….has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me – and everyone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2018

The New York Times reported at the time that the UK’s concern was over material which “includes direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele,” the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous “Steele Dossier.” The UK’s objection, according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele’s identity in an official document, “regardless of whether he had been named in press reports.” 

We noted in September, however, that Steele’s name was contained within the Nunes Memo – the House Intelligence Committee’s majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.

Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who – along with Steele – was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS. 

Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016. Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with). 

Also recall that CIA/FBI “informant” (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page and Papadopoulos in London. 

Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails.

Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. –Daily Caller

In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for “research,” over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season. 

Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying about his conversations with a shadowy Maltese professor and self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation, has publicly claimed he was targeted by UK spies, and told The Telegraph that he demands transparency. Trump’s allies in Washington, meanwhile, have suggested that the facts laid out before us mean that the ongoing Russia investigation was invalid from the start. 

In short, it’s understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the “witch hunt” of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start.

Steele’s ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true. 

Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele’s unauthorized contacts with the press.

He shared results of his investigation into Trump’s links to Russia with the FBI beginning in early July 2016.

The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier’s claims, which include that he was the Trump campaign’s back channel to the Kremlin. –Daily Caller

That said, Steele hasn’t worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious. 

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Authored by Bernard Connolly via The Spectator,

Four years ago, 45 per cent of Scottish voters favoured leaving the UK. Many of the warnings about the negative impact of independence on the Scottish economy were justified. But they did not extinguish a yearning for independence – and the same could be said of the EU referendum, with the caveat that this time a majority voted to leave, and many of the warnings were unjustified.

An ineradicable desire to get our country back triumphed over the Project Fear campaign conducted by the Treasury and the whole of the nomenklatura that sought to preserve position, power and privilege for itself and to suppress any notion that ordinary people, in Britain or in any other European country, could have a say in how they are governed.

In part, that triumph came because of the risible – and dubiously motivated – nature of the economic argument for staying in as presented by assorted anti-Brexit ‘experts’; the ‘experts’ who habitually get the big questions wrong.

Indeed, I believe that on the balance of probabilities the longer-term impact of Brexit on the British economy will be favourable.

Now we’re being told that leaving the EU without a deal would be economically catastrophic.

Curiously, those same ‘experts’ didn’t flag up such purported risks associated with Scotland leaving the EU and the UK without a deal four years ago; and Scottish independence would have inevitably been a no-deal exit from both. The EU, and for that matter the rest of the UK, could not have negotiated any kind of trade arrangement with Scotland until it became a sovereign state – that is, until it was already out of the UK and thus out of the EU. Yet no one suggested, as they now suggest about Brexit, that ‘no deal’ would mean the imposition of a blockade. Not even the most ardent unionists warned of plagues of super-gonorrhea and of Prime Ministers being deprived of insulin. Why not?

The answer says a lot about the true nature of the EU and its attitudes to Britain, which are very different from English attitudes to Scotland.

But economics first. The Treasury’s notorious short-term prediction of immediate recession, rocketing unemployment and a ‘punishment Budget’ if Leave won has been shown to be utterly, scandalously wrong. For one thing, it assumed that fiscal and monetary policy would become more restrictive if Leave won. That aspect of their dire warnings was proved false the very day after the referendum. But even to have threatened that the people would be punished for voting in the ‘wrong’ way was disgraceful.

The Treasury’s emanations are nearly always wrong. Yet the organs of the establishment trot out the Treasury’s even more fantastical medium-term and long-term warnings of income foregone after we’ve left the EU empire, even with a deal. Its assessment of the Brexit impact on productivity growth is based on the so-called gravity model of trade. Unsurprisingly, however, the Treasury model, despite being used by a highly-politicised body, ignores the most important aspect of the relationship: what happens to the power of those in charge when trade arrangements change?

The gravity model has been based mainly on the experience of the integration of previously backward and/or communist countries into the capitalist world economy. When operated in the Treasury’s biased way, it attributes just to the volume of trade impacts that should be attributed to an associated institutional and political improvement, and in particular a reduction in the exploitative power of rent-seeking organisations, whether public (the state) or private (big landlords and monopoly firms).

The Treasury thus reverses the correct sign of the productivity impact of Brexit. There will be substantial long-run Brexit gains in productive potential (a Corbyn/McDonnell government is an obviously important caveat to this but one less likely to be relevant in a no-deal scenario with a proper Conservative leader than in a May-capitulation scenario). The political system would become more democratic and open; the power of those in charge would be reduced; we would be freed from the EU’s protectionist customs union and could reduce tariffs with the rest of the world, whether reciprocally or unilaterally; and we would be freed from the anti-competitive (and very obviously anti-British) Single Market rules.

What about the threatened biblical plagues that will supposedly be visited on us if we leave without a deal? Why were these blood-curdling threats not made in the Scottish referendum? Quite rightly, no one would have believed such stories. No one would ever have imagined that the rest of the UK would have blockaded Scotland; and Brussels knew that if it had ordered Britain to institute a blockade that order would have been ignored, creating an immediate crisis for the whole EU edifice.

So why do Brussels and the civil service now make fearful threats about no deal? Where Brussels, Berlin and Paris are concerned, the answer is obvious. In the Scottish case, they reasoned on the principle that ‘my enemy’s [England’s] enemy [Scotland, as they saw it, ignoring three hundred years of shared history] is my friend.’ In the Brexit case, there is just an enemy – Britain – which must be impoverished, subjugated and humiliated. As for the domestic branch of the nomenklatura, one shudders to think what might be shaping its attitude.

The economic and, importantly, financial-system cost (and, even more, the security and defence cost) to the EU as a whole – and particularly to some individual EU countries, such as Ireland, and sectors, such as the German auto industry – of a no-deal Brexit and no FTA will be substantial. May’s deal, in contrast, would be very beneficial to the EU, allowing it to impose additional regulatory burdens on British firms and gain access to British markets on terms unfavourable to Britain, as bait in FTAs with other countries. So one can understand why the EU prefers May’s capitulation deal, even without taking into consideration the dreadful dilemma for the EU about the Irish border question it will have created for itself if there is no deal.

But if the trahison des clercs of the British Establishment is defeated, and we leave without a May-type deal, will the EU institute a punishment blockade? One hopes there will be bilateral side deals. But one cannot ignore the motivation of the EU. Its mindset is arguably that the war – a war against political legitimacy – has never ended. Britain is now the most vulnerable part of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, as it was in 1803-05 and in 1940. The obstruction of supplies of food and medicines to Britain would in effect be an act of aggression – but simply a more overt act in what has always been a long-running fight against the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’.

So either no deal holds no terrors, or terrors have to be confronted, as we once confronted Napoleon. Defending our independence, and by extension that of every European people, from an historically vengeful European Empire is worth more than a container-load of avocados.

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Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Revenge Is Mine Saith Washington

Justice has disappeared in the West. In Justice’s place stands Revenge. This fact is conclusively illustrated by Julian Assange’s ongoing eight year ordeal.

For eight years Julian Assange’s life has been lived in a Kafka Police State. He has been incarcerated first under British house arrest and then in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, despite the absence of any charges filed against him.

Meanwhile, the entirety of the Western world, with the exception of former Educadoran President Rafael Correa and a UN agency that examined the case and ruled Assange was being illegally detained by the UK government’s refusal to honor his grant of political asylum, has turned its back to the injustice.

Assange is locked away in the Ecuadoran Embassy, because to protect him from false arrest, former Ecuadoran President Correa gave him political asylum. However, the corrupt and servile UK government that serves Washington, and not justice or law, refused to honor Assange’s asylum. The US vassal known as the UK stands ready to arrest Assange on Washington’s orders if he steps outside the embassy and to hand him over to Washington, where a large number of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have said he should be executed. The Trump regime, carrying on the illegal practices of its forebears, has a secret indictment waiting to be revealed once they have their hands on Assange.

The current president of Ecuador a servant of Washington, Lenin Moreno – a person so lacking in character that his name is an insult to Lenin – is working a deal with Washington to rescind Assange’s grant of asylum so that the Ecuadoran Embassy in London has to expel Assange into the hands of Washington.

What has Assange done? He has done nothing but to tell the truth. He is a journalist who heads Wikileaks, a news organization that publishes leaked documents – exactly as the New York Times published the leaked Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. Just as the publication of the Pentagon Papers embarrassed the US government and helped to bring about the end of the senseless Vietnam War, the documents leaked to Wikileaks embarrassed the US government by revealing Washington’s war crimes, lies, and deception of the American people and US allies.

The allies, of course, were bought off by Washington and remained silent, but Washington intends to crucify Assange for the embarrassment and payoff expense he caused the criminal government in Washington.

In order to assert authority over Assange, Washington is using the extra-territoriality of US law, a claim that Washington bases not on law but on might alone and uses to violate the sovereignty of independent countries. Assange is a citizen of Australia and Ecuador. He is not subject to US law. Even if he were, he has committed no espionage. The false equivalence Washington is trying to establish between the exercise of the First Amendment and treason shows how totally lost are the American people. The silence of the US media demonstrates that the presstitutes don’t mind losing the First Amendment’s protection as they have no intention of telling any truths.

Washington’s secret indictment – it is secret so that two-bit punks such as James Ball can write in the Guardian that Assange faces no threat of arrest – most likely accuses Assange of espionage. But it is not legally possible to accuse a non-citizen operating outside the country of espionage. All countries engage in espionage. Every country on earth could accuse Washington of espionage and arrest the CIA. The CIA could, as it often has, accuse Israel of espionage. Of course, any Israeli, such as Jonathan Pollard, who is convicted of espionage in the US becomes a point of contention between Washington and Israel and Israel always wins. The corrupt Obama regime released Pollard from his life sentence on orders and, no doubt, generous bribes, from Israel.

If Assange were Israeli, he would be home free, but he is a citizen of two countries whose governments place high value on being Washington’s vassals.

There was a time in America, many decades ago, when the Democrats stood for justice and the Republicans stood for greed.

There was a time in America, prior to 9/11, when the media would have rushed to the defense of the freedom of the press and defended Assange from his mistreatment and false charges. To be sure that the reader understands the mistreatment of Assange, it is identical to the mistreatment of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty of Hungary whose asylum in the US Embassy in Budapest was not acknowledged by the Soviet government, forcing Mindszenty to live out all but three years of his remaining life in the US embassy.

President Nixon negotiated his release in 1971, but the Nixon haters give Nixon no credit for his attention to one man locked away in an injustice part of the earth.

Today there is no such attention to injustice except for the “victim” groups in Identity Politics. Where is the champion of Assange now that Rafael Correa has to live abroad to avoid persecution by Washington’s puppet Moreno?

The weakness of the intellect in the West is scary. Caitlin Johnstone tells us about it:

“Trump’s despicable prosecution of Assange, and corporate liberalism’s full-throated support for it, has fully discredited all of mainstream US politics on both sides of the aisle. Nobody in that hot mess stands for anything. If you’re still looking to Trump or the Democrats to protect you from the rising tide of fascism, the time to make your exit is now.”

The entirety of the Western print and TV media—even Russia’s RT—serves as a propaganda ministry for Washington against Assange. For example, we read over and over that Assange is hiding out in the London Ecuadoran Embassy to avoid rape charges in Sweden. That the presstitutes and the feminists can keep this bogus claim alive despite all the official repudiation of it shows the Matrix in which Western peoples are corralled.

Assange has never been charged with rape. The two Swedish women who seduced him and brought him into their beds in their homes never said he raped them. Assange’s tribulations began when one of the women who seduced him worried that he did not use a condom and that he might have HIV or Aids. She asked Assange to take a test to see if he was sex disease free, and Assange, offended, refused. This was his mistake. He should have said, “of course, I understand your concern” and taken the test.

The woman went to the police to see if Assange could be forced to take the test. It was the police who turned this into a rape investigation. Charges were brought, and the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dropped all charges as the sex was consensual.

Assange left Sweden legally, not in flight as the story that Washington has planted has it. He went to England, another mistake as England is Washington’s playground. Washington and/or lesbian feminists lusting for the conviction of a heterosexual male convinced a female Swedish prosecutor to reopen the closed case.

In an unprecedented act, the Swedish prosecutor issued an order to the UK for Assange to be handed over for questioning. Extradition orders are only valid for filed charges, and there were no filed charges, only dismissed charges. Never before had even the corrupt UK government granted an extradition order for questioning. The UK government, Washington’s puppet, agreed to hand over Assange to Sweden. It was completely clear as there was no case in Sweden against Assange that the Swedish prosecutor, probably for a large sum, would turn Assange over to Washington, a place in which no legal protections exist for anyone, not even for those, such as whistleblowers, who are protected by US law, but, despite the protection of law, nevertheless go to prison.

Seeing what was coming, Assange was granted political asylum by President Correa and escaped house detention in the UK to make it to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he has been ever since, despite the Swedish government’s dropping of all charges against Assange and again closing the investigation.

In the meantime a US attorney, corrupt as they all are – never believe any federal indictment as they are created out of whole cloth without any need of evidence – managed to convince an incompetent American grand jury to indict Assange for what we do not yet know, but most likely for espionage.

The US grand jury that approved the secret indictment has no comprehension that they indicted a person for telling the truth precisely as protected – and required if government is to be controlled by the people—by the US Constitution. All Assange did was to publish documents sent to Wikileaks by a person with a moral conscience who was disturbed at the blatant criminality and inhumanity of the US government.

There is no legal difference whatsoever between Wikileaks publishing the documents leaked to Wikileaks, and the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers leaked to the New York Times.

The difference is the difference in time. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, the media had not been concentrated into a few hands by the corrupt Clinton regime, and 9/11, which was used by Dick Cheney to criminalize truth-telling, had not occurred. Therefore in the 1970s it was still possible that some important part of the media might tell the truth. Nevertheless, the only reason that the NYTimes published the Pentagon Papers is that the newspaper hated Richard Nixon, who the Democratic media blamed for the Vietnam War even though it was Democratic President Johnson’s war and Nixon wanted to end it.

When the insouciant American and Western peoples accept their governments’ lies, they accept their own demise and servitude. The willingness and abandon with which the Western peoples submit makes one conclude that they prefer servitude. They don’t want to be free, because freedom has too many responsibilities, and they don’t want the responsibilities. They want go watch a movie, or a TV program, or play video games, or have sex, go shopping, get drunk, have a drug high, or whatever form of amusement that they value far more than they value liberty, or truth, or justice.

To a person of my disappearing generation, it is inexplicable that the nations of the world, much less Americans, would stand moot while the world’s best, most trusted and most honest journalist is set up by a totally corrupt US government for destruction. The result of Assange’s persecution will be to criminalize embarrassing the US government.

When I contemplate this massive injustice to which the peoples of the world reply with silence, I wonder if those trying to save Western Civilization are not misguided. What is the point of saving a totally corrupt civilization?

Those who attack Assange are despicable. If you have a chance to push one or more of those who are members of the lynch mob in front of a truck, think of the act as a cleansing opportunity.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2TKjhGW Tyler Durden

Akihiko Kondo, 35, who teaches at a middle school in Tokyo, married Hatsune Miku, a virtual hologram of a teenage girl, earlier this month, Reuters reports.

The hologram, which takes the shape of a 16-year-old girl with long, turquoise ponytails, “is a singing voice synthesizer featured in over 100,000 songs,” according to Crypton Future Media, the company behind the digital character.

Despite strong disapproval and complete embarrassment from his family, Kondo married the hologram in Tokyo on November 04. The wedding, which cost over $18,000, was attended by 40 guests — excluding all of Kondo’s immediate family members.

A light inside a two-foot-high $2,800 Amazon Echo-esque device, projects the bride into an image, was represented at the wedding by a “cat-sized stuffed doll.”

While he acknowledged the traditional path to marriage, Kondo told Reuters Television that, “the shape of happiness and love is different for each person.

“There definitely is a template for happiness, where a real man and woman get married, have a child and live all together. But I don’t believe such a template can necessarily make everyone happy.”

Kondo, who decided at an early age that he would never discover the perfect someone, said he found Hatsune Miku on the internet and instantly fell in love.

After spending many long nights on the internet with Hatsune Miku, he then figured out Miku was “the one,” for some time, Kondo became devoted to his virtual girlfriend, who has hundreds of thousands of other fans worldwide.

Kondo received congratulations from friends and other Hatsune Miku fans on social media. Likewise, he was also accused of being a “creepy otaku,” or a geek for marrying a virtual teenage girl.

A marriage registration application from Gatebox, the company behind the virtual hologram device, was offered for those who wanted to marry virtual characters. However, Kondo soon found out that marrying something that is not real has no legal grounds.

Gatebox – Promotion Video 

A few weeks since the wedding, Kondo told Reuters that people are contacting him on social media, “saying they were encouraged” and it has given them strength.

Kondo ends the interview by saying:

“I never cheated on her; I’ve always been in love with Miku-san…I’ve been thinking about her every day.”

Do you think Kondo has had her checked out for any infections or viruses? 

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Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The situation in Syria is that of a frozen conflict, following the agreements made between Russia, Turkey and Syria on the demilitarized zone created around Idlib. Except for some sporadic terrorist attacks, the truce seems to be holding up over the last few weeks, even though it has become clear to everyone what the next step is for the province.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has been busy eradicating Daesh in the southern part of Syria in recent weeks, concentrating its efforts on securing all areas that have been liberated from terrorist control but which still remain vulnerable to sporadic attacks, as occurred in Sweida at the end of July 2018. In that incident, there were dozens of victims and numerous abductees who remained in the hands of Daesh for months. This caused the Syrian population in neighbouring areas to clamor for protection, forcing the SAA to undertake an anti-terrorist campaign that has been ongoing since August.

This effort by the SAA has slowed down in part due to subsequent events, with an agreement reached between Erdogan and Putin to create a demilitarized zone in the province of Idlib. From October 15, an area spanning 20 kilometres and guarded by Turkish and Russian troops guarantees a separation between the SAA and terrorist groups in the province.

Russian and Syrian efforts have been moving in two very specific directions over the last few weeks. While Moscow supplies Damascus with new equipment in preparation for the future advance on Idlib, Putin and his entourage continue diplomatic efforts to draw more of Syria’s enemies closer to the Russia-Iran-Syria axis. The meeting that brought about the demilitarized zone included Macron and Merkel, the Europeans having evidently come to terms with the impossibility of overthrowing the legitimate government of Syria. Macron and Merkel were offered a way out of the Syrian conflict, decoupling themselves from the belligerent stance of the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The intention is to usher Paris and Berlin towards the same direction Qatar, Turkey and Jordan have been progressively gravitating. Certainly, these are not countries to be considered friends of Damascus. Rather, they are parties with whom a constructive dialogue needs to be entered into in order to advance common diplomatic interests.

Moscow has often found it possible to reach an agreement or start unpublicized negotiations with each of these parties. Erdogan seems to have preferred an agreement with Putin rather than waiting for the liberation of Idlib by the SAA, thus being able to postpone the natural conclusion of the war that will find him sitting at the table defeated. At the same time, Erdogan wants to concentrate on the Kurds in order to secure the border between Syria and Turkey controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and to prevent any partition of Syrian territory that would favor other parties. Jordan has even reopened the border crossings with Syria, appearing to be the first country in opposition to Damascus that is now taking practical steps to mend fences.

The case of the participation of the two European countries at the summit with Erdogan and Putin is more complex. The rift between Washington and the other European capitals is wide and well documented, even more so after the events in Paris commemorating the end of the First World War. Macron and Trump seem to be diverging further in terms of policy and ideology, while Trump and Merkel have always had their differences. Trump’s choices in the Middle East, in the wake of the destructive actions of Israel and Saudi Arabia, marked a profound point of difference and mistrust with the European allies. Macron and Merkel have a huge problem dealing with refugees flowing from areas in North Africa and the Middle East destroyed by US-led wars. The prospect of working with Erdogan, and indirectly with Damascus, to bring back hundreds of thousands of refugees currently in France and especially Germany, seems to have been Putin’s winning argument during the talks in Istanbul.

This slow diplomatic approach has been accelerated as a result of Israel’s downing of a Russian electronic-surveillance aircraft. The need to avoid a direct conflict between Moscow and Tel Aviv allowed the Russian missile forces to deploy to Syria an advanced model of the S-300 in addition to the existing S-300/400 systems on the ground. The presence of these advanced systems, and Moscow’s threats to use them, together with American concerns over the possibility of an F-35 being shot down by Soviet systems dating from the 1970s, forced the Zionist entity to halt its attacks on Syria.

This situation has helped to create a frozen conflict in the country. Together with the agreement of Idlib, this gives the SAA plenty of time to rest, regroup, and receive supplies needed for future campaigns.

The current truce is a strategic pause that has all the appearance of what has happened in the past in the provinces of Homs and Aleppo. The need to free Idlib from terrorists goes hand in hand with the promise of Assad and the government of Damascus to liberate every inch of Syria from terrorists. The diplomatic efforts of Moscow serve to prepare the ground for what will happen in the coming months, with the SAA set to advance on Idlib. In this sense, the deployment of advanced systems in Syria serves as a deterrent against possible responses from countries like Israel and the United States, anxious to defend their jihadists, but continuing to have minimal influence on the ground.

Russia and Syria’s moves therefore seem to be in preparation for the battle for Idlib, to be the longest and most difficult yet. The liberation of the province is inevitable but requires all the necessary political, diplomatic and military preparation in order to ensure success and limit potential escalation. As is often the case, Moscow and her allies approach complex issues with simple and pragmatic solutions, even offering exit strategies to their (geo)political opponents, which contrasts with Washington’s demonstrated tendency to rush heedlessly towards war.

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Considering all the money the US government spent on the F-35, it makes sense the Air Force would want to show them off.

To that end, the Pentagon has released a video taken by the US Air Force of a drill involving F-35s from the 419th and 388th Fighter Wings. It starts with the jets lined up in formation at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah before taking off in rapid succession at intervals of about 20 to 40 seconds.

According to RT, the drill was intended to demonstrate “the readiness and lethality” that the US Air Force could bring to bear by deploying the jets against air and ground targets.

Time lapse snippet as we launched 35 F-35As alongside the @AirForceReserve @419fw as we demonstrated our #AirPower today. 📷: 2nd Lt. Christina Judd #F35 @usairforce @USAF_ACC pic.twitter.com/OC6rywsvLO

— 388th Fighter Wing (@388fw) November 19, 2018

The leader of one of the fighter squadrons brought this point home in a brief comment to the media.

“We are ready to fight tonight,” Major Caleb Guthmann of the 34th Fighter Squadron said.

The production of the F-35 was famously plagued by delays, design flaws, and cost overruns. In one of his first controversial tweets after winning the 2016 election, President Trump complained about the “tremendous cost” of the jets.

Based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35, I have asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

In response, Lockheed Martin agreed to cut their price.

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Authored by Anthony Mueller via The Mises Institute,

When politicians and bureaucrats fail to deliver what they promise – which happens a lot – we’re often told that the problem can be solved if only we get the right people to run the government instead.

We’re told that the old crop of government agents were trying hard enough. Or that they didn’t have the right intentions. While it’s true that there are plenty of incompetent and ill-intentioned people in government, we can’t always blame the people involved. Often, the likelihood of failure is simply built in to the institution of government itself. In other words, politicians and bureaucrats don’t succeed because they can’t succeed. The very nature of government administration is weighted against success. 

Here are ten reasons why:

I. Knowledge

Government policies suffer from the pretense of knowledge . In order to perform a successful market intervention, politicians need to know more than they can. Market knowledge is not centralized, systematic, organized and general, but dispersed, heterogeneous, specific, and individual. Different from a market economy where there are many operators and a constant process of trial and error, the correction of government errors is limited because the government is a monopoly. For the politician, to admit an error is often worse than sticking with a wrong decision – even against own insight.

II. Information Asymmetries

While there are also information asymmetries in the market, for example between the insurer and the insured, or between the seller of a used car and its buyer, the information asymmetry is more profound in the public sector than in the private economy. While there are, for example, several insurance companies and many car dealers, there is only one government. The politicians as the representatives of the state have no skin in the game and because they are not stakeholders, they will not spend much efforts to investigate and avoid information asymmetries. On the contrary, politicians are typically eager to provide funds not to those who need them most but to those who are most relevant in the political power game.

III. Crowding out of the Private Sector

Government intervention does not eliminate what seem market deficiencies but creates them by crowding outthe private supply. If there were not a public dominance in the areas of schooling and social assistance, private supply and private charity would fill the gap as it was the case before government usurped these activities. Crowding-out of the private sector through government policies is constantly at work because politicians can get votes by offering additional public services although the public administration will not improve but deteriorate the matter.

IV. Time Lags

Government policies suffer from extended lags between diagnosis and effect. The governmental process is concerned with power and has its antenna captures those signals that are relevant for the power game. Only when an issue is sufficiently politicized will it find the attention of the government. After the lag, until an issue finds attention and gets diagnosed, another lag emerges until the authorities have found a consensus on how to tackle the political problem. From there it takes a further time span until the appropriate political means have found the necessary political support. After the measures get implemented, a further time elapses until they show their effects. The lapse of time between the articulation of a problem and the effect is so long that the nature of the problem and its context have changed – often fundamentally. It comes as no surprise that results of state interventions, including monetary policy , do not only deviate from the original goal but may produce the opposite of the intentions.

V. Rent Seeking and Rent Creation

Government intervention attracts rent-seekers. Rent seeking is the endeavor of gaining privileges through government policies. In a voter democracy, there is a constant pressure to add new rents to the existing rents in order to gain support and votes. This rent creation expands the number of rent-seekers and over time the distinction between corruption and a decent and legal conduct gets blurred. The more a government gives in to rent-seeking and rent creation, the more the country will fall victim to clientelism, corruption, and the misallocation of resources.

VI. Logrolling and Vote Trading

The public choice concept of ‘ logrolling ’ denotes the exchange of favors among the political factions in order to get one’s favored project through by supporting the projects of the other group. This conduct leads to the steady expansion of state activity. Through the ‘quid pro quo’ of the political process, the lawmakers support pieces of legislation of other factions in exchange for obtaining the political support for their own project. This behavior leads to the phenomenon of ‘legislative inflation’, the avalanche of useless, contradictory and detrimental law production.

VII. Common Good

The so-called ‘ common good’ is not a well-defined concept. Similar terms, such as that of the ‘public good’, which is defined by non-excludability and non-rivalry, misses the point because it is not the good that is ‘common’ or ‘public’ but its provision when this is deemed more efficient by collective than individual efforts. However, this is the case with all goods and the market itself is a system of providing private goods through cooperative efforts. The market economy is a collective provider of goods as it combines competition with cooperation. Any of the so-called ‘public goods’, which the government supplies, the private sector can also deliver, and cheaper and better as well. In contrast to the state, the cooperation in a market economy includes competition and thus not only economic efficiency but also the incentive to innovate.

VIII. Regulatory Capture

The term ‘ regulatory capture ’ denotes a government failure where the regulatory agency does not pursue the original intent of promoting the ‘public interest’ but falls victim to the special interest of those groups, which the agency was set up to regulate. The capture of the regulatory body by private interests means that the agency turns into an instrument to advance the special interests of the group that was targeted for regulation. For that purpose, the special interest group will ask for extra regulation to obtain the state apparatus as an instrument to promote its special interests.

IX. Short-Sightedness

The political time horizon is the next election. In the endeavor that the benefits of political action come quickly to their specific clienteles, the politician will favor short-term projects over the long-term even if the former bring only temporary benefits and cost more in the long run than an alternative project where the costs come earlier and the benefits later. Because the provision of public goods by the state severs the link between the bearer of the cost and the immediate beneficiary, the time preference for the demand for the goods that come apparently free of charge by the state is necessarily higher than in the market system.

X. Rational Ignorance

It is rational for the individual voter in a mass democracy to remain ignorant about the political issues because the value of the individual’s vote is so small that it makes not much difference for the outcome. The rational voter will vote for those candidates who promise most benefits. Given the small weight of an individual vote in a mass democracy, the rational voter will not spend much time and effort to investigate whether these promises are realistic or in a collision with his other desires. Thus, the political campaigns do not have information and enlightenment as the objective but disinformation and confusion. What counts, in the end, is to get votes. Not the solidity of the program is important but the enthusiasm a candidate can create with his supporters and how much he can degrade, denounce, and humiliate his opponent. As a consequence, election campaigns incite hatred, polarization, and the lust for revenge.

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