We South Africans are so consumed by the mess of our politics that we rarely take time to make sense of what is going on around the world.
In a nutshell, the world has gone through two historic periods:
a period of crude empire, which lasted until the mid-20th century, and
a very short period of subtle empire, which lasted until 2008.
During the centuries-long period of crude empire, rulers of kingdoms, principalities or states derived a sense of greatness from either invading, destroying or subjugating other societies.
Kingdoms or states that had a reputation for greatness were those that mastered the craftiest military strategy, typically under the leadership of a feared commander-tyrant.
Names such as Hannibal of Carthage, Julius Caesar of the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great of the Greek kingdom of Macedonia, or Shaka Zulu of the Zulu kingdom, are emblematic of the ancient world of the crude empire.
Modern imperialism up to the 20th century was also a form of imperial crudity, driven by a modernized Westphalian state. The instinct of imperial crudity was sustained by the crudity of ancient warfare.
The tyrants and military strategists of yore harbored the belief they could destroy the society next door without being destroyed in turn. It was always a bloody gamble.
In the era of the Westphalian state, the same urge to destroy or subjugate a neighbor, with the hope not to be destroyed, drove modern rulers into wars of crude imperialism. This is how the first and the second world wars came about.
The frightening scale of human destruction that took place, especially in the World War Two, facilitated by a more sophisticated modern weaponry and awakened humankind to the suicidal folly of the hope to destroy without being destroyed.
Thus, the last European lords of crude empire – Great Britain and France – realized the need to entrust their global security and interests to the new leader of an emerging period of subtle empire, the US.
In the new era of weapons of mass destruction, the US knew it enjoyed no luxury to destroy a neighbor without being destroyed.
Banking on its economic strength in the mid-20th century, the US sponsored the erection of a novel institutional architecture that would buttress that country’s leadership in the new era of subtle imperialism. That’s how the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation came about.
Although there were times when the US applied crudity in its imperial engagement, particularly during the Cold War, internal democracy and the protection of human freedoms were used to project the cultural and ideational supremacy of the US in the world.
Over time, ordinary people across the world, even in countries that professed to pursue an alternative social order, such as Russia, envied American culture and its way of life.
It all collapsed in 2008, when America’s financial system proved to be the cancerous cells infecting the economic blood of the rest of the world. Suddenly all American-linked or -sponsored institutions became suspect in the eyes of the people of the world.
By the time America’s subtle empire collapsed, China had sufficient economic resources to signal its readiness to take over the global leadership.
But the US does not want the locus of global power to shift from the West to the East. This is precisely what the trade war between China and the US is about.
But where does SA stand in all this? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that either our intellectually bland president or our tired international relations minister has a clue.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2REFcyp Tyler Durden
Last October, we were one of the first to report that China tested the world’s largest transport drone. Now it appears the drone has undergone several more tests, this time with a heavy cargo delivery exercise.
The aerial delivery exercise was conducted by the National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation in Zhangye, Northwest China’s Gansu Province, at an unspecified time, reported The Global Times.
The exercise featured a Feihong-98, the world’s largest transport drone, with a maximum payload of 1.5 tons. It’s a modified single-engine biplane, called the Shifei Y5B, a China-developed transport plane from the 1950s.
The Feihong-98 carried military supplies and successfully airdropped it at an unspecified area on a plateau with difficult terrain.
“The exercise met our expected objective. It is very significant for our unmanned logistics chain in future warfare,” said Bi Guangyuan, executive director of the exercise, CCTV reported.
This was China’s first airdrop of cargo from a transport drone weighing more than 1,100 pounds and traveling at a distance of about 310 miles, Li Ruixing, the president of the PLA National Defense University’s joint logistics academy, told CCTV.
“We … explored a new model of military cargo delivery in joint combat as well as in strategic and tactical logistics support,” Ruixing said.
A military expert who asked to remain anonymous told The Global Times on Sunday that the plane is expected to haul even heavier cargo loads in upcoming tests.
With a takeoff and landing distance of roughly 500 ft., the transport drone could be the most affordable means of resupplying Chinese militarized islands in the South China Sea.
In the last twenty years, China has emerged as one of Washington’s top competitors in the global drone market. China is offering affordable drone technology, that has been rapidly gaining global market share.
China manufactures several types of drones. The Caihong 5 (CH-5) Rainbow, its newest multi-role capable drone, has seen increased activity in the Middle East — especially the Yemeni Civil War. The CH-5 competes with the American Reaper and Israeli Heron TP.
China is a major exporter of multi-role strike capable drones. Between 2008 and 2017, China exported a total of 88 drones to eleven different countries.
China, the rising power in the Eastern Hemisphere, has challenged the US, the status quo power in the South China Sea. China is rapidly developing and deploying armed and transport drones as a sign that military conflict between both powers is inevitable.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2J6Et5k Tyler Durden
“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.
Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.
No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots. Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.
Brace yourselves.
While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.
Case in point: in Charlottesville, Va.—home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president—city councilors in a quest for so-called “equity” have proposed eliminating Jefferson’s birthday as a city holiday (which has been on the books since 1945) and replacing it with a day that commemorates the liberation of area slaves following the arrival of Union troops under Gen. Philip Sheridan.
In this way, while the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. In Charlottesville, as in the rest of the country, little is being done to stem the tide of the institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans being stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.
Tell me again why it’s more important to spend valuable political capital debating the birthdays of dead presidents rather than proactively working to put a stop to a government mindset that teaches cops it’s okay to treat citizens of any color with brutality and a blatant disregard for their rights?
It doesn’t matter that Phoenix and Charlottesville are 2100 miles apart. The lethal practices of the American police state are the same all over.
No amount of dissembling can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America. As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.
So stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other. Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.
This is how evil wins.
This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.
This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
The world has been down this road before.
As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:
Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.
We are no longer living the American Dream. We’re living the American Lie.
Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes—who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.
The American people have become compulsive believers: left-leaning Americans are determined to believe that the world has become a far more dangerous place under Trump, while right-leaning Americans are equally convinced that Trump has set us on a path to prosperity and security.
Nothing has changed.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.
In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).
Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies and slaves rather than citizens.
SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own heavily armed law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.
The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield and “we the people” into enemy combatants.
Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.
For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.
Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”
The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests.
Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.
The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking your every move.
The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.
Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Indeed, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.
So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.
The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.
They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”
The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.
“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”
Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined:
“[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”
In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.
Life is good in America as long as you don’t have to come face to face with a trigger-happy cop hyped up on the power of the badge, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and disposed to view people of color as a suspect class.
Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.
Life is good in America as long as you’ve got enough money to spare that you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.
Joint Base Andrews in Maryland recently issued a threat brief regarding “incels”: members of an online movement that “adopt an ideology of misogyny, mistrust of women, and violence in response to their failed attempts at romantic relationships,” according to Task and Purpose.
The term “incel” is generally defined as: “…members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom. Self-identified incels are largely white and are almost exclusively male heterosexuals. The term is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibates”.”
Another, simpler definition: men who can’t get laid.
Several mass casualty events as a result of “incels” have happened with increasing frequency since May 2014, after a 22 year old man shot and killed six women in California as “retribution” for years of being rejected by the opposite sex.
The Air Force included in its briefing a screenshot of a common internet meme used by “incels” called “Becky vs. Stacy”, a diagram that purportedly shows how “incels” judge women based solely on their physical features.
And the screenshot appeared the day after a former Army infantryman who frequently noted the “incel” movement, Brian Isaack Clyde, opened fire outside a Dallas building and was subsequently shot by Federal officers. Clyde frequently shared memes related to the movement before the incident.
According to the briefing:
“Incels believe “they are owed attention from ‘Beckys’. Most Incels believe only men can be Incels as women could engage in sexual activity if they wanted to.”
The briefing claims that the meme shows an “increase in discussion” of the topic on forums like Reddit and 4chan, forums where an April 2018 van attack in Toronto was cheered after its perpetrator declared he wanted to incite an “incel rebellion”.
And there have been numerous other examples of “incels” committing crimes:
The following November, 40-year-old Scott Beierle shot and killed two women in a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio. A former Army second lieutenant, he was discharged for “unacceptable conduct” that involved “inappropriate contact with female soldiers,” according to a Washington Post investigation.
Beierle “was an avowed hater of women, a man who repeatedly grabbed women in real life and fantasized about raping and killing them in the horrific collection of lyrics, poetry and novels he began writing as a teenager,” according to the investigation. “His interactions with the opposite sex had gotten him fired from teaching jobs, booted from the Army and hauled before the principal of his high school.
Then, in January 2019, 27-year-old Christopher Wayne Cleary was arrested on terrorism charges following social media posts threatening a mass shooting over his virginity. “I’m planning on shooting up a public place soon and being the next mass shooter cause I’m ready to die and all the girls the turned me down is going to make it right by killing as many girls as I see,” he wrote on Facebook.
11th Wing spokesman Aletha Frost confirmed the document’s autheticity, noting:
“The intent of the brief was to educate the Joint Base Andrews commanders on the behaviors and activities attributed to the group to safeguard our Airmen/installation.”
Let’s hope no one ever introduces this community to Islam’s promise of 72 virgins…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IOk1ap Tyler Durden
An awkward moment straight out of The Naked Gun unfolded at Wednesday night’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates, after the microphones belonging to the first hour’s moderators were left on while they were backstage.
As second hour moderator Chuck Todd began to ask a gun control question, former moderators José Díaz-Balart and Savannah Guthrie could be heard having a conversation backstage which included the phrases “I need to go to the restroom” and “someone’s got my binder.”
A visibly steamed Todd turned to fellow moderator Rachel Maddow and said “We are hearing our colleagues audio. If the control room could turn off the mics of our previous moderators…,” making the best of it.
“We prepared for everything. We did not prepare for this,” Maddow replied.
Let’s see what happens during Thursday night’s debate, which will include Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders among others. Hopefully NBC can better manage their equipment.
At this rate, Putin won’t even have to spend $100,000 on Facebook ads for Trump to win
On what has been an otherwise relatively slow news day as President Trump heads to Japan for this weekend’s G-20 summit, the Associated Press has joined Reuters in publishing an expose about a cyberespionage campaign that just might have its origins in Beijing.
According to the AP, which sourced its story from a presentation given by the head of Cybereason, a global cybersecurity contractor brought in by telecoms firms to trace the source of another potentially major breach, a group of possibly state-backed hackers infiltrated the system of an unnamed telecoms giant to spy on a group of unnamed “VIPs” call records, location data and other information. The hack essentially allowed the hackers to track the movements and activities of the targets. And because the hack occurred at the service-provider level, it would be virtually impossible for the 20 or so end-user targets to discover the breach on their own. In essence, the hackers were able to transform the targeted firm into a “global surveillance system.”
Cybereason Chief Executive Lior Div said because customers weren’t directly targeted, they might never discover that their every movement was being monitored by a hostile power.
The hackers have turned the affected telecoms into “a global surveillance system,” Div said in a telephone interview. “Those individuals don’t know they were hacked – because they weren’t.”
Div, who presented his findings at the Cyber Week conference in Tel Aviv, provided scant details about who was targeted in the hack. He said Cybereason had been called in to help an unidentified cellular provider last year and discovered that the hackers had broken into the firm’s billing server, where call records are logged.
The hackers were using their access to extract the data of “around 20” customers, Div said.
And here’s some food for thought: Cybereason cautioned that even though all signs of who the culprit might be pointed to APT10, the MSS-backed hacker crew that orchestrated China’s ‘Operation Cloud Hopper’, the campaign that reportedly infiltrated eight of the world’s largest enterprise tech companies, they were reluctant to conclusively blame APT10 for the intrusions.
Why? Because these signs could have been manufactured to point to APT10, even though the real culprit could have been another government, or a criminal organization, or maybe even the infamous ‘400-pound basement dweller’ that Trump once joked about.
Who might be behind such hacking campaigns is often a fraught question in a world full of digital false flags. Cybereason said all the signs pointed to APT10 – the nickname often applied to a notorious cyberespionage group that U.S. authorities and digital security experts have tied to the Chinese government.
But Div said the clues they found were so obvious that he and his team sometimes wondered whether they might have been left on purpose.
“I thought: ‘Hey, just a second, maybe it’s somebody who wants to blame APT10,'” he said.
Since Cybereason was contracted by a large telecoms firm to carry out its investigation, it couldn’t say for sure whether the targets of the hacking campaign had been alerted to the intrusion. Whether to notify the targets, they said, had been left to their client to decide. The firm said it had been in contact with a ‘handful’ of law enforcement agencies about the intrusions, but again they refused to reveal who exactly had been brought in the loop.
Whoever hired Cybereason would be remiss if they didn’t disclose the intrusion, since failing to alert their investors could be construed as securities fraud. But if the recent past is any guide (remember Equifax?), companies that have been the victim of large-scale hacks are often reluctant to disclose it for fear of the market backlash.
But if China is behind the hacks, that would give the Trump Administration one more reason to hold off on striking a trade deal on the grounds that Beijing simply can’t be trusted to end its sweeping cyberespionage campaign.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FALH0l Tyler Durden
Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran’s shootdown of a U.S. Global Hawk spy plane over the Gulf of Oman.
The U.S. claims the drone was over international waters. Tehran says it was in Iranian territory. But while the loss of a $100 million drone is no small matter, no American pilot was lost, and retaliating by killing 150 Iranians would appear to be a disproportionate response.
Good for Trump. Yet, all weekend, he was berated for chickening out and imitating President Barack Obama. U.S. credibility, it was said, has taken a big hit and must be restored with military action.
By canceling the strike, the president also sent a message to Iran: We’re ready to negotiate. Yet, given the irreconcilable character of our clashing demands, it is hard to see how the U.S. and Iran get off this road we are on, at the end of which a military collision seems almost certain.
Consider the respective demands.
Monday, the president tweeted:
“The U.S. request for Iran is very simple — No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!”
But Iran has no nuclear weapons, has never had nuclear weapons, and has never even produced bomb-grade uranium.
According to our own intelligence agencies in 2007 and 2011, Tehran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, the only way Iran could have a nuclear weapons program would be in secret, outside its known nuclear facilities, all of which are under constant U.N. inspection.
Where is the evidence that any such secret program exists?
And if it does, why does America not tell the world where Iran’s secret nuclear facilities are located and demand immediate inspections?
“No further sponsoring of terror,” Trump says.
But what does that mean?
As the major Shiite power in a Middle East divided between Sunni and Shiite, Iran backs the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s civil war, Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Alawite Bashar Assad in Syria, and the Shiite militias in Iraq who helped us stop ISIS’s drive to Baghdad.
In his 12 demands, Pompeo virtually insisted that Iran abandon these allies and capitulate to their Sunni adversaries and rivals.
Not going to happen. Yet, if these demands are nonnegotiable, to be backed up by sanctions severe enough to choke Iran’s economy to death, we will be headed for war.
No more than North Korea is Iran going to yield to U.S. demands that it abandon what Iran sees as vital national interests.
As for the U.S. charge that Iran is “destabilizing” the Middle East, it was not Iran that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrew the Gadhafi regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Assad in Syria, or aided and abetted the Saudis’ intervention in Yemen’s civil war.
Iran, pushed to the wall, its economy shrinking as inflation and unemployment are rising, is approaching the limits of its tolerance.
And as Iran suffers pain, it is saying, other nations in the Gulf will endure similar pain, as will the USA. At some point, collisions will produce casualties and we will be on the up escalator to war.
Yet, what vital interest of ours does Iran today threaten?
Trump, with his order to stand down on the missile strike on Iran, signaled that he wanted a pause in the confrontation.
Still, it needs to be said: The president himself authorized the steps that have brought us to this peril point.
Trump pulled out of and trashed Obama’s nuclear deal. He imposed the sanctions that are now inflicting something close to unacceptable if not intolerable pain on Iran. He had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard declared a terrorist organization. He sent the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and B-52s to the Gulf region.
If war is to be avoided, either Iran is going to have to capitulate, or the U.S. is going to have to walk back its maximalist position.
And who would Trump name to negotiate with Tehran for the United States?
The longer the sanctions remain in place and the deeper they bite, the greater the likelihood Iran will respond to our economic warfare with its own asymmetric warfare. Has the president decided to take that risk?
We appear to be at a turning point in the Trump presidency.
Does he want to run in 2020 as the president who led us into war with Iran, or as the anti-interventionist president who began to bring U.S. troops home from that region that has produced so many wars?
Perhaps Congress, the branch of government designated by the Constitution to decide on war, should instruct President Trump as to the conditions under which he is authorized to take us to war with Iran.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Ym4LqQ Tyler Durden
Over the past year, Western media organizations have published a non-stop stream of reports about “Operation Cloudhopper”: The Chinese government’s clandestine program to spy on and siphon economic secrets from some of the world’s largest tech companies.
We have shared somedetails of the program before: China’s Ministry of State Security has worked with a shadowy group of hackers called ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ 10 to infiltrate American and European enterprise tech firms using a very consistent MO: Hackers would infiltrate the cloud computing networks of ‘managed service providers’, then ‘hop’ from network to network’, gaining entree to the networks of these firms’ clients. Back in December, the US named some of the hackers suspected of working with APT10, and was backed up by Germany, New Zealand, Canada, Britain, Australia and other allies all issued statements.
Notably, the Chinese cyberespionage campaign continued even after Beijing and the Obama Administration agreed to a pact to cease all cyberespionage activities.
But as devastating as these attacks have been, the details have been kept under wraps, as corporate victims have pushed for their privacy to be protected. But for the first time since the US indicted the two suspected APT members, a sweeping Reuters investigation has laid out details of attacks, many of which have been previously reported, but not in quite as much depth.
An investigation by Reuters found that “Cloud Hopper” impacted six additional firms aside from IBM and HPE, which it had previously reported. These included at least five of the world’s 10 largest tech service firms. In addition to HPE and IBM, the hacks emanated out to those firms’ clients, including Swedish telecoms firm Ericsson, and a handful of Japanese fims. Ultimately, industrial and commercial secrets were stolen.
The hacking campaign, known as “Cloud Hopper,” was the subject of a U.S. indictment in December that accused two Chinese nationals of identity theft and fraud.Prosecutors described an elaborate operation that victimized multiple Western companies but stopped short of naming them. A Reuters report at the time identified two: Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM.
Yet the campaign ensnared at least six more major technology firms, touching five of the world’s 10 biggest tech service providers.
Also compromised by Cloud Hopper, Reuters has found: Fujitsu, Tata Consultancy Services, NTT Data, Dimension Data, Computer Sciences Corporation and DXC Technology. HPE spun-off its services arm in a merger with Computer Sciences Corporation in 2017 to create DXC.
Waves of hacking victims emanate from those six plus HPE and IBM: their clients. Ericsson, which competes with Chinese firms in the strategically critical mobile telecoms business, is one. Others include travel reservation system Sabre, the American leader in managing plane bookings, and the largest shipbuilder for the U.S. Navy, Huntington Ingalls Industries, which builds America’s nuclear submarines at a Virginia shipyard.
“This was the theft of industrial or commercial secrets for the purpose of advancing an economy,” said former Australian National Cyber Security Adviser Alastair MacGibbon. “The lifeblood of a company.”
Over the course of its reporting, Reuters interviewed 30 people involved in the “Cloud Hopper” investigations, including government officials, company insiders and private security contractors. One of the most stunning aspects of the investigation was how persistent the hackers were. Even after their code was purged from the network, APT managed to find its way back in.
Also incredible: How the security breaches went unnoticed, sometimes for years.
For security staff at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Ericsson situation was just one dark cloud in a gathering storm, according to internal documents and 10 people with knowledge of the matter.
For years, the company’s predecessor, technology giant Hewlett Packard, didn’t even know it had been hacked. It first found malicious code stored on a company server in 2012. The company called in outside experts, who found infections dating to at least January 2010.
Hewlett Packard security staff fought back, tracking the intruders, shoring up defenses and executing a carefully planned expulsion to simultaneously knock out all of the hackers’ known footholds.
But the attackers returned, beginning a cycle that continued for at least five years.
Throughout the investigation, the Chinese hackers showed their American peers how woefully ill-equipped they were. Not only did the hackers stay one step ahead of the investigators tracking them, but they littered their code with expletives and taunts.
The intruders stayed a step ahead. They would grab reams of data before planned eviction efforts by HP engineers. Repeatedly, they took whole directories of credentials, a brazen act netting them the ability to impersonate hundreds of employees.
The hackers knew exactly where to retrieve the most sensitive data and littered their code with expletives and taunts. One hacking tool contained the message “FUCK ANY AV” – referencing their victims’ reliance on anti-virus software. The name of a malicious domain used in the wider campaign appeared to mock U.S. intelligence: “nsa.mefound.com.”
Ultimately, it’s impossible to say how many of HP’s customers were impacted by “Cloud Hopper”. Though investigators were able to envision at least one “nightmare scenario” involving an HP client: Sabre Corp., a travel-reservation company and HP client, might become vulnerable to Chinese infiltration. If APT and the MSS could gain access to Sabre’s systems, they could easily track the travel patterns of American corporate executives and other VIPs, exposing them to in-person surveillance and bugging.
The HPE operation had hundreds of customers. Armed with stolen corporate credentials, the attackers could do almost anything the service providers could. Many of the compromised machines served multiple HPE customers, documents show.
One nightmare situation involved client Sabre Corp, which provides reservation systems for tens of thousands of hotels around the world. It also has a comprehensive system for booking air travel, working with hundreds of airlines and 1,500 airports.
A thorough penetration at Sabre could have exposed a goldmine of information, investigators said, if China was able to track where corporate executives or U.S. government officials were traveling. That would open the door to in-person approaches, physical surveillance or attempts at installing digital tracking tools on their devices.
In 2015, investigators found that at least four HP machines dedicated to Sabre were tunneling large amounts of data to an external server. The Sabre breach was long-running and intractable, said two former HPE employees.
Via the breach at HP, APT and the MSS also gained entree to the American defense industry by accessing the server of Huntington Ingalls, a company that builds nuclear powered submarines.
In early 2017, HPE analysts saw evidence that Huntington Ingalls Industries, a significant client and the largest U.S. military shipbuilder, had been penetrated by the Chinese hackers, two sources said.
Computer systems owned by a subsidiary of Huntington Ingalls were connecting to a foreign server controlled by APT10.
In Sweden, Huawei rival Ericcson was a persistent target of MSS, though the company often couldn’t tell what, exactly, the hackers were after.
Like many Cloud Hopper victims, Ericsson could not always tell what data was being targeted. Sometimes, the attackers appeared to seek out project management information, such as schedules and timeframes. Another time they went after product manuals, some of which were already publicly available.
In what has become a pattern for reports about China’s cyberespionage, the Reuters expose was published as President Trump prepares to depart for Osaka for the G-20 summit, where he’s scheduled to meet with President Xi. Under Trump, the DoJ has stepped up its efforts to punish China and individuals spies for their cyberespionage activity. Whether Trump stands his ground on cyberespionage is only one factor here. Even if Beijing grants assurances that it will stop, how can the US be sure that it’s not simply lip service like that paid to the Obama administration?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JmpSTF Tyler Durden
As if censorship isn’t enough, leftists have decided to ramp up their demands that those who have a different political view be financially blacklisted. A coalition of far-left political activist organizations known for peddling smears about conservatives held a protest at Mastercard’s annual general meeting (AGM) today, demanding that the international credit card giant financially blacklist wider sections of the political right.
Fortunately, Mastercard didn’t cave to the tyrannical demands of the George Soros-backed groups. According to Breitbart, at Mastercard’s AGM, the far-left groups SumOfUs and Sleeping Giants circled the venue with a mobile billboard stating: “Putting hate groups out of business? #Priceless.”
The groups’ proposal to form a “human rights committee” did not sway shareholders, who voted the measure down. According to a press release published by the two organizations, this was coupled with a speech from Sleeping Giants co-founder Nandini Jammi, “addressing the need for Mastercard to take swift action by cutting off its services to these hate groups.”
Socialists just can’t stand it when people have access to their own money and can spend it how they want. It’s control these sociopaths seek.
SumOfUs is purportedly a “human rights” activist group that now campaigns to make speech with which it politically disagrees unprofitable. Its website lists a number of powerful left-wing foundations among its partners, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation, the Media Democracy Fund, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
Earlier this year, SumOfUs presented a proposal to Mastercard’s shareholders, calling on the company to establish a “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to the “far right.” The protest aimed to pressure Mastercard to accept the proposal. Shareholders voted down the proposal this morning, despite the protest. –Breitbart
Sleeping Giants was formed with the sole purpose of smearing those who have differing political views. The group’s founders initially refused to take accountability for the organization’s words and actions by remaining anonymous. Sleeping Giants was set up in 2016 by far-left political activists with the sole stated purpose of defunding Breitbart by spreading lies about it. The identity of its other founder, a former advertising professional Matt Rivitz, was revealed last year. Sleeping Giants coupled these smears with targeted social media harassment campaigns against corporations whose ads appeared on Breitbart News.
Although Mastercard’s board says it is committed to the principle of allowing “all lawful purchases,” online payments platform Patreon says that Mastercard asked it to withdraw service from Islam critic Robert Spencer, founder of JihadWatch.org, in August 2018. Mastercard also pressured a payment processor to cut off service to conservative activist, think tank founder and author David Horowitz last year, but later the processor reinstated service following pressure from Breitbart News and other conservative media. –Breitbart
There have been some liberal groups coming to the defense of conservatives and sounding the alarm on the blatant censorship and financial blacklisting being demanded by authoritarian control freaks on the far left. In July of last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned that banks, credit card companies and payment processors are becoming “de facto internet censors.”
The only way to prevent censorship and financial blacklisting is to stand against it, and speak out. Free speech can’t be killed with a law as it’s simply a piece of a human being’s free will. But a move toward a cashless society would put the entire financial system into the hands of a few elitists, allowing them to “cut off” those who they feel are socially or politically unacceptable.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KHgfSv Tyler Durden
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China published new data Monday that shows agricultural imports from the US have fallen, as Chinese buyers shift supply chains out of the US to other countries because of the deepening trade war.
In the first five months of 2019, imports of agricultural products from the US crashed 55.3% YoY. Much of decline was due to a 70.6% YoY decline of soybeans in the same period.
Chinese importers went to Brazil, Argentina, and ASEN countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, and Laos). Data showed imports from the EU, Australia, and Canada also jumped in the first five months as Chinese buyers ditched American products.
A report last week by yicai.com showed cotton imports from the US reached 60% of forecasts because of the tariffs, along with declining spot prices.
With cotton trade between the US and China on the decline, this could spell near term trouble for American producers because 17% of their total cotton exports route to China.
Ma Wenfeng, an agriculture analyst, told the Global Times on Monday, that China has quickly diversified its import sources away from the US to ensure domestic supply continues. “Overall, China mostly relies on domestic cotton for its textile industry,” Wenfeng said, adding that China has undertaken reform to reduce its dependence on American products.
Global Times referenced a report from ncpqh.com that showed total imports of American cotton stood at 505,400 tons, accounting for 4.1% of total cotton supply in China in 2017.
“In comparison, imports of cotton from other countries, including Brazil and India, have been steadily on the rise,” Wenfeng noted.
As Chinese imports of American agricultural products comes to a screeching halt, farm sentiment across the Midwestern US plunges to crisis levels.
“We cannot withstand another year in which our most important foreign market continues to slip away and soybean prices are 20 to 25%, or even more, below pre-tariff levels,” said John Heisdorffer, chairman of the American Soybean Association, in a statement published on May 13.
Jiao Shanwei, editor-in-chief of cngrain.com, a grain industry news website, said an escalating trade war would result in the US agriculture sector losing an even larger market share of China.
For instance, “the biggest sources of soybeans are mainly in South America, such as Brazil. Imports from the US make up only one-third of total imports,” Shanwei told the Global Times on Monday.
While China sources agricultural products from other countries, the US agriculture sector will likely become the biggest loser of the trade war this year, expected to entire a crisis in the coming quarters.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IRrs0H Tyler Durden
