Tag: news

While few industries have been spared by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, even fewer have been hit as hard as the tourism sector.

As 2020 drew to a close with severe limitations to travel still in place, the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) expects international arrivals to have declined by 70 to 75 percent compared to the previous year. As Statista’s Felix Richter writes, that equates to a decline of around 1 billion international arrivals, bringing the industry back to 1990 levels.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the global tourism sector had seen almost uninterrupted growth for decades.

Since 1980, the number of international arrivals skyrocketed from 277 million to nearly 1.5 billion in 2019. As Statista‘s chart above shows, the two largest crises of the past decades, the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the global financial crisis of 2009, were minor bumps in the road compared to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking ahead, most experts don’t expect a full recovery in 2021, which started off with many countries still battling the second wave of the pandemic. According to the UNWTO’s estimates, it will take the industry between 2.5 and 4 years to return to pre-pandemic levels of international tourist arrivals.

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

Two things that seem futuristic: Bitcoin and energy efficiency. Two things that are diametrically opposed: Bitcoin and energy efficiency. Mining Bitcoin might not sound like a resource-intensive process, but in fact it requires almost unbelievably vast amounts of energy. In order to track the shocking energy footprint of Bitcoin mining, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance created an online tool that measures this consumption to its best ability and compares it to the energy consumption of other entities to put the shocking quantities into perspective.

Thanks to the climbing price of Bitcoin, this week the cryptocurrency’s energy consumption topped that of Pakistan–a nation of more than 200 million people.

This spike in Bitcoin mining is thanks to an explosion in Bitcoin prices. The cryptocurrency’s value has jumped 276% this year alone, trading above $30,000 on Tuesday with a total market value over $500 billion. As MarketWatch points out, this could make Bitcoin not only more energy intensive, but less energy efficient, as the price spike “has made it more profitable to use less-efficient equipment.”

It’s not just Bitcoin’s energy footprint and market value that are gargantuan–its carbon footprint is worryingly large as well.

Last year, however, Bitcoin defenders rallied around a new study by cryptocurrency investment products and research firm CoinShares that found nearly 75% of Bitcoins were mined using clean energy. Unfortunately, that report has now come under great scrutiny by other researchers, who have found that estimate to be greatly exaggerated. After all, two thirds of all Bitcoin mining in the world takes place in China, where more than half of the nation’s power is coal-fired.

In recent months however, this dependence on coal has become a major issue for Bitcoin mining operations in China. As China has experienced an energy shortage in recent months, in large part thanks to Beijing’s decision to blacklist Australian coal imports, domestic Bitcoin mining has come under siege. While China is still far and away the world’s largest trader of Bitcoin, energy shortages and the increased production of other countries are quickly closing that cap.

As of now, two thirds of bitcoin production happens in China, followed by the United States which represents just 7% of all bitcoin production.

The U.S. is closely followed by Russia and Kazakhstan. But that ranking could soon change as Russia makes a power play to ramp up its mining operations in a venture led by Gazpromneft, the petro-based subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned natural gas giant Gazprom, the 10th biggest oil producer in the world.

Gazpromneft recently began a cryptocurrency mining operation based in one of its Siberian oil drilling sites, “unlocking the power of Russia’s oil and gas resources for the needs of bitcoin mining,” Yahoo! Finance reported this week. In slightly better news for Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, Russia’s new mining operation will be powered by natural gas from the oil field, located in the Khanty-Mansiysk region of northwestern Siberia, which has its own power plant to convert the gas into electricity for Bitcoin production. And there is another silver (and green) lining to this model:

“The CO2 that gets freed during the oil drilling is normally a liability for oil companies as they have to burn it into the atmosphere, which results in fines. However, there are ways to utilize it instead of wasting it, and electricity generation is one of them,” Yahoo! Finance reports.

The location of the new Russian Bitcoin farm also means that the costs of the operation will be relatively low. Instead of paying a premium to use energy from the grid, locating the cryptocurrency mining on-site at an oil field means that a steady supply of natural gas is virtually free.

All this is to say that China and the U.S. had better get ready for some stiff competition. 

Since the world’s first CCTV camera was installed in Germany in 1942, the number of surveillance cameras around the world has grown immensely. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes, it only took us 79 years to go from one camera to nearly one billion of these devices.

In the above interactive graphic, Surfshark maps out how prevalent CCTV surveillance cameras are in the world’s 130 most populous cities.

Big Brother is Watching

So how many of us are being watched? China and India are the countries with the highest densities of CCTV surveillance cameras in urban areas. Chennai, India has 657 cameras per square kilometer, making it the number one city in the world in terms of surveillance.

Here’s a closer look at the world’s top 10 cities by CCTV density.

London is the only non-Asian city to crack the list with 399 CCTV cameras per square kilometer.

Beijing ranks in tenth place. The Chinese capital has the highest number of CCTV cameras in total, at just over 1.1 million installed in the city.

Although CCTV cameras have become extremely prevalent in cities around the world, this does not mean these cameras are seeing and recognizing our every move. In most instances, cameras are in a fixed position—and some of the more invasive aspects of CCTV, like accompanying facial recognition technology, are not universal yet.

The Need for CCTV

The ubiquity of surveillance cameras can be unnerving to some, as they represent diminishing privacy. However, there are also those that feel the presence of cameras creates added safety.

While governments like China’s claim that having high amounts of surveillance cameras helps reduce crime, the actual data gets messy. For example, the Chinese city of Taiyuan has roughly 120 cameras per every thousand people and yet the city has a higher crime index than most.

Freedom vs. Security

As surveillance networks become more sophisticated and granular, there is increasing concern about breaches to personal freedoms.

China is doubling down with surveillance in its cities by pioneering the usage and exportation of facial recognition technology. This technology is integral to China’s proposed social points system. With a database of 1.3 billion pictures that can be matched to a face on a CCTV camera in seconds, troublemaking citizens can easily be identified.

In India, on the other hand, the amount of cameras can be attributed to mass urbanization, rising crime, and scarcity of urban resources. Overall, there is a rising middle class that wishes to protect itself with the use of CCTV cameras.

As we close in on one billion CCTV surveillance cameras globally by the end of 2021, we will undoubtedly continue to be monitored well into the future.

Authored by Aaron Maté via TheGrayZone.com,

For the first time, OPCW chief Fernando Arias was asked a series of direct questions at the United Nations about the cover-up of a Syria chemical weapons probe. He answered none of them.

Russia’s UN ambassador asked Arias about several damning leaks, some revealed by The Grayzone, as well as ongoing deceptive attacks on the veteran scientists who challenged the censorship of their investigation. Arias refused to answer in public session, and gave vague, non-substantive answers in private.

Aaron Maté recaps the unanswered questions to Arias, as well as recent attacks on the OPCW whistleblowers via Western state-funded outlets Bellingcat and the BBC.

Read more:

Draft debacle: Bellingcat smears OPCW whistleblower, journalists with false letter, farcical claims

Questions for BBC on new White Helmets podcast series attacking OPCW whistleblowers

OPCW executives praised whistleblower and criticized Syria cover-up, leaks reveal

Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

Read Part I: Reduced Expectations And Bio-Techno-Feudalism here…

Read Part II: Corporate Socialism here…

The title of this essay represents a play on the Chinese Communist Party’s description of its economy. Several decades ago, when China’s growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the CCP, its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe the Chinese economic system. Formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the phrase became an essential component the CCP’s attempt to rationalize Chinese capitalist development under a socialist-communist political system.

According to the party, the growing privatization of the Chinese economy was to be a temporary phase—lasting as long as a hundred years according to some party leaders—on the way to a classless society of full socialism-communism. The party leaders claimed, and still maintain, that socialism with Chinese characteristics was necessary in China’s case because China was a “backward” agrarian country when communism was introduced—too early, it was suggested. China needed a cap­italist booster shot.

With the slogan, the party was able to argue that China had been an exception to the orthodox Marxist position that social­ism arrives only after the development of capitalism—although Marx himself deviated from his own formula late in life. At the same time, the slogan allowed the CCP to confirm the ortho­dox Marxist position. China’s communist revolution had come before developed industrial capitalism—an exception to orthodox Marxism. Capitalism was thus introduced into China’s economic system later—a confirmation of orthodox Marxism.

Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, socialism with Chinese characteristics, or the Chinese system itself, amounts to a socialist-communist state increasingly funded by capitalist economic development. The difference between the former Soviet Union and contemporary China is that when it became obvious that a socialist-communist economy had failed, the former gave up its socialist-communist economic pretenses, while the latter did not.

Whether the CCP leaders believe their own rhetoric or not, the ideological gymnastics on display are nevertheless spectacu­lar. On its face, the slogan embeds and glosses over a seemingly obvious contradiction in an attempt to sanctify or “recommu­nize” Chinese capitalist development as a precondition of full socialism-communism.

However, the Chinese slogan does capture an essential truth about communism, one that is either unrecognized or unac­knowledged by the CCP and denied by Western Marxists. Con­trary to the assertions of communist leaders and followers, and even contrary to the claims of many who oppose it, socialism-com­munism is not essentially an economic but rather a political system.

Once in power, socialist-communist leaders recognize that given their control over resources, they have effectively become the new owners of the means of production (whereas, as Lud­wig von Mises suggested, consumers effectively hold the power of economic disposal in free markets). In attempting to implement a socialist-communist economy, they recognize that, in the absence of prices, large-scale industrial production requires supervisory decision-making. Likewise, decision-making is not democratic in the sense promised by socialist-communist ideologues. Decision-making must be centralized, or at least bureaucratized, to a great extent. Democratic decision-making is precluded by state-owned and controlled production and distri­bution.

Socialism-communism is a political system in which resource allocation is commanded by the state and thus effectively controlled by the state leaders, the real ruling class. The latter retain control through ideology and force.

As opposed to a fully implemented economic system, socialism-communism is always only a political arrange­ment. This is why socialism-communism can be combined with “capitalism” under such forms as “state capitalism” or corporate socialism. Its economic pretensions will be jettisoned as capitalist development is introduced and cleverly rationalized, as in Chi­na. If such pretentions are maintained for long, they will wreck society, as in the former Soviet Union. In either case, the social­ist-communist leadership will learn that wealth production re­quires the accumulation of privately held capital—whether they understand why or not.

Enter Corporate Socialism

A socialist-communist sequel is coming to a theater near you. Some of the same old characters are reappearing, while new ones have joined the cast. While the ideology and rhetoric sound nearly the same, they are being put to slightly different ends. This time around, the old bromides and promises are in play, and a similar but not identical bait and switch is being dangled. Socialism promises the protection of the beleaguered from the economically and politically “evil,” the promotion of the economic interests of the underclass, a benign banning of “dangerous” persons from public forums and civic life, and a primary or exclusive concern for “the common good.” China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative may hang the takers in Africa and other underdeveloped regions as if from an infrastructural noose. A different variety is on the docket in the developed world, including in the US.

The contemporary variant is corporate socialism, or a two-tiered system of “actually existing socialism” on the ground, coupled with a parallel set of corporate monopolies or would-be monopolies on top. The difference between state socialism and corporate socialism is merely that a different constituency effectively controls the means of production. But both depend on monopoly—one the state and the other the corporate monopolization of the economy. And both depend on socialist-communist ideology of democratic socialism, or, in a recent variant, “social justice” or “woke” ideology. Corporate socialism is the desired end, while democratic socialism and woke capitalism are among the means.

China is the model for the economic and political system being promoted in the West, and the Great Reset is the most forthright articulation of that system – although its articulation is anything but perfectly forthright.

The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism” later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and said, “yes, we want it.”

This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise system as we understand it.

The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and control.

In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.

The US Navy could be a couple of years away from deploying the largest unmanned undersea vehicle called “Snakehead” to scout underwater areas and gather intelligence on enemy forces. 

Called the Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (LDUUV), the Snakehead program will be an important electronic warfare platform for the service. 

Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) published a final request for proposals (RFP) for Snakehead’s Phase 2 last week. While the actual RFP is only available to defense firms bidding on the build, the Navy could select a company to begin the build as early as Sept. 30. 

“Snakehead is a long-endurance, multi-mission unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), deployed from submarine large open interfaces, with the capability to deploy reconfigurable payloads,” NAVSEA said in a press release while referring to the RFP. “It is the largest UUV intended for hosting and deployment from submarines.”

Snakehead can be launched and recovered by littoral combat ships and nuclear-powered submarines. It will play a critical role for the Navy in conducting intelligence, surveillance, and countermeasure mine missions.

To do this, the drone will have a variety of sensors, including side-scan sonars and bathymetric sensors, to generate maps of the seabed for search and destroy missions. 

Snakehead is not the first submarine the Navy is planning to launch. The service is secretly developing armed robot submarines controlled by onboard artificial intelligence that could kill the enemy without human control. 

Upon completion of the build, the Navy will likely deploy these underwater drones somewhere in the Pacific as geopolitical tensions with China continue to rise. Courtesy of BofA is a map of US military bases and presence in the Pacific Ocean and, specifically, in proximity to China.

Besides the US, China and Russia are also developing or deploying underwater drones as it appears fully autonomous weapons will soon be prowling underneath the world’s oceans. 

Authored by Peter van Buren via TheAmericanConservative.com,

The Bidens, and even the Clintons, are small-time players. The real corruption is much bigger, much higher, and entirely unpunished.

I learned the facts of life from a drunk uncle. He was not an American, and worked in international construction in Asia. His main job was to bribe people. Over the course of many tiny glasses of some awful, clear Asian liquor I learned every yard of concrete poured required money to gangsters who controlled unions and to politicians who controlled permits. A fact of life, he said. You get used to it. He even had a joke—my hands are dirtier than the guys who dig the foundations.

You come to realize someone is pulling the strings behind everything and it usually isn’t you, he said. The odd official just doing his job for his salary is a rube. You feel embarrassed for him, saying no for moral reasons. You learn, uncle slurred, to trust nothing. That politician on TV? The company just dropped off a nice check to his “charity.” Play by the rules? Those were the rules.

The first bribe I ever paid was to an Indonesian immigration officer, who noticed some small defect on my passport. Of course, he said, it could be resolved. Between us. With a fine (so many euphemisms). Off to the side. In cash. It was all of $20 to save a vacation but I felt filthy, cheated, a chump. But I learned the rules.

In New York we use the euphemism “tip,” and it is as required as oxygen to get through the day. A restaurant table pre-COVID. A last minute anything. A friendlier handling by a doorman. Timely attention to fix-it requests. My, um, friend, used to pay a lot of money for better hotel rooms until he learned $20 at check in with a friendly “anything you can do” often got him upgraded to the same thing at a fraction of the price. What, you still paying retail, bro?

I used to think it was all small stuff, maybe with the odd mafia king bribing a judge with real money or something else Netflix-worthy.

In America we were ultimately… fair, right? But things started to add up. We have our petty corruption like anywhere, but our souls are filthy on a much larger scale. America goes big or it goes home.

Things like the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from the Saudis to help with women’s empowerment, an issue of course dear to the heart of the Kingdom. When it looked like his wife was going to be president, Bill made six-figure speeches to businesses seeking influence within the U.S. government, earning $50 million during his wife’s term as secretary of pay-for-play state. The Foundation, now mostly out of business, was at its peak a two-billion-dollar financial dangle. It spent in 2013 the same on travel expenses for Hillary and her family as it did on charitable grants. The media, forever big Clinton fans, told us we should be used to it. Hey, Nixon was so much worse.

Trump refused to be very specific about who his charity donated to. We know its offshoot, the Eric Trump charity, donated to a wine industry association, a plastic surgeon supposedly gifting nose jobs to kids, and an artist who painted a portrait of Donald. Trump-owned resorts received $880,000 for hosting Trump-sponsored charity events. Trump donated money from his foundation to conservative influencers ahead of his presidential bid.

With Joe as vice president, the Bidens made $396,000 in 2016. But in just the four years since leaving the Obama White House, Joe and Jill made more than $15 million. In fact, as his prospects for election improved, Joe and his wife made nearly twice as much in one year as they did in the previous 19 years combined. Joe scored $10 million alone for a book no one read. Jill was paid more than $3 million for her book in 2018. Joe has a tax-dodge S Corporation that donated money back to his own political PAC. Then of course there was Hunter, who scored millions in Chinese and Ukrainian money for doing nothing but being Joe’s son.

About half the nation got very twisted over Trump’s corruption and actively avoided noticing the Clintons and Bidens, and vice-versa, to the point of covering their ears NYANYANAYNYA. Yeah, politicians are corrupt, but does anyone think the donors in all three cases didn’t know what they were buying? What, you still voting retail, bro?

But even all those millions, measured in Epsteins (a unit of influence buying I just made up) are petty cash. Real corruption scales. Pre-COVID America’s 614 billionaires were worth $2.95 trillion. As the Dow hit record highs this month, there are now 650 billionaires and their combined wealth is $4 trillion. The 400 richest Americans own 64 percent of the country’s wealth.

Where’d all their money come from? You.

Dan Gilbert, chair of Quicken Loans, worth $7 billion in March, is now at $43 billion (thanks for paying on time each month.) Who benefited more from COVID and everyone buying from home then Amazon and Jeff Bezos? It takes a lot of poor people to sustain that amount of wealth at the top.

Money is always good. But it is wrong to think just in dollars. That’s how small-time grifters like waiters and the Bidens think. The real rich understand wealth as power. The power to shape society and government to ensure they make more money for more power until someday they Have. It. All. You hope one day for an upgrade to business class; they own the jet.

To talk about conspiracy theories is to imply something “different” happened, that the system does not work as intended; for example, instead of an election the president was assassinated to change leaders. So let’s not call what happened this autumn to elect Joe Biden a conspiracy.

But here is what happened.

Corporate media owned by the wealthiest Americans spent four years attacking Trump. Working as a single organism fused to the Democratic party as its host, they tried to bundle Trump into a SuperMax as a literal Russian agent. When that failed they ginned up an impeachment with more holes in it than a bad joke about Stormy Daniels. The same media then pivoted to defense when it mattered most, sending information about Hunter Biden that would have changed the election down the memory hole, and policing social media to Joe’s advantage.

Corporate pharma, also owned by the same people, held back announcement of COVID vaccines until just after the election. The intel community, tightly bound with Big Tech and its super-wealthy owners, did its part leaking and concealing information as needed. They too worked to discredit the Hunter Biden story by calling it Russian disinfo. Money that actually controls information is gold.

Earlier in the contest something happened, again, in Democratic primaries which began with some of the most progressive candidates in the running since Henry Wallace. Instead a politician known as the Senator from Mastercard was pushed into the White House. It was just a coincidence two promising candidates, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, dropped out nearly simultaneously just ahead of the South Carolina vote Biden desperately needed to end Bernie, again. How many people in America are powerful enough to have made those phone calls to Pete and Amy?

Biden promptly returned the favor, filling his Cabinet with the same old thinkers corporate America liked from the Obama years. A highlight is Janet Yellen (net worth $13 million) at Treasury, who helped swizzle the corporate bailout that created the .01 percent out of the one percent after the Great Recession. Notice how crises for most of us like the Recession and COVID end up benefiting the wealthy? Biden was wrong when he told donors “nothing would fundamentally change” for the wealthy when he’s in charge—actually, things’ll get better.

A tiny percentage of Americans own, control, and benefit from most everything; some call them the one percent but a large number of even those people are just slugs and remoras (hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers) who feed off the crumbs left by the really powerful. You know a handful of the names—Bezos, Gates, Buffet—because they own public-facing companies. Most of the others prefer less public lives while they control the public.

And silly you, you worried that it was the Russians who stole the election. What, you aren’t down with using Prime points to vote in the next election, bro?