Tag: news

Authored by Aleksandar Pavic via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Although the September 30, 2018 name-change referendum in Macedonia, which was supposed to set that ex-Yugoslav federal republic on a path to (certain) NATO and (blithely promised but much less certain) EU membership, failed miserably, with only 36.91% of the voters turning out, well short of the 50% + 1 necessary for it to be valid – one would never know it from the reactions of its Western proponents and impatient beneficiaries. Indeed, a new term may be needed to adequately describe the reactions of the key pillars representing the reliquiae reliquiarum of the Western-led post-Cold War unipolar moment. Fake news simply doesn’t do them justice. Fake reality anyone?

The US State Department was firmly in denial, releasing the following statement: 

“The United States welcomes the results of the Republic of Macedonia’s September 30 referendum, in which citizens expressed their support for NATO and European Union (EU) membership by accepting the Prespa Agreement between Macedonia and Greece. The United States strongly supports the Agreement’s full implementation, which will allow Macedonia to take its rightful place in NATO and the EU, contributing to regional stability, security, and prosperity. As Macedonia’s parliament now begins deliberation on constitutional changes, we urge leaders to rise above partisan politics and seize this historic opportunity to secure a brighter future for the country as a full participant in Western institutions.”

EU Commissioner for European Neighborhood and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn wasn’t to be outdone in his contempt for the 63% of the Macedonian “deplorables” who stayed home in order to voice their disagreement with renouncing their perceived national identity and country name (it was to become “Northern Macedonia”) in exchange for the double joy of a) becoming NATO’s cannon-fodder in its increasingly hazardous game of chicken with Russia and b) the EU’s newest debt-serfs: 

“Referendum in Macedonia: I congratulate those citizens who voted in today’s consultative referendum and made use of their democratic freedoms. With the very significant “yes” vote, there is broad support to the #Prespa Agreement + to the country’s #Euroatlantic path. I now expect all political leaders to respect this decision and take it forward with utmost responsibility and unity across party lines, in the interest of the country.” 

He was seconded the following day, in a joint statement, by Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the EU Commission.

Understandably, as the most direct public stakeholder, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was particularly (hyper)active. As the disappointing results began to roll in, Stoltenberg went into immediate damage control, tweeting: 

“I welcome the yes vote in Macedonia referendum. I urge all political leaders & parties to engage constructively & responsibly to seize this historic opportunity. #NATO’s door is open, but all national procedures have to be completed.” 

He reinforced his delusional missive the next day, releasing a similar statement co-signed by EU President Donald Tusk. And the day after, during a news conference, Stoltenberg even offered lightning-quick NATO accession to the unwilling Macedonians – January 2019, to be exact – if they would just be so kind as to urgently implement the very agreement that they had just so emphatically rejected. When NATO says it promotes democratic values – it means it!

But that wasn’t the end of the “democracy mongering” surrounding what may well prove to be NATO’s, the EU’s and the rest of the end-of-history West’s Balkan Waterloo. For example, the EU Parliament’s Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, although “regretting that the turnout was less than 50%,” nevertheless hailed the referendum’s results and “call(ed) on the opposition to respect the expressed will of the majority [sic] of voters.”

The Group’s leader, Udo Bullmann, while also maintaining that, somehow, a voter turnout of under 37% still represented a “majority,” additionally used the occasion to chastise Macedonia’s President for having the nerve to call for a boycott of the referendum (he committed the crimethink of referring to it as “historical suicide” during his UN General Assembly address), as well as to decry – what else? – “reports about Russian interference in the electoral process.”

It goes without saying that Bullmann offered absolutely zero proof for his assertion. On the other hand, according to numerous media reports, as September 30 approached, while no high Russian official was to be seen anywhere in the vicinity, a veritable procession of Western political bigwigs made the pilgrimage to Skopje in order to reveal to the natives their “true” best interests: Sebastian Kurz, “Mad Dog” Mattis, the indefatigable Stoltenberg, Federica Mogherini, Johannes Hahn, Angela Merkel. No meddling there, obviously…

Speaking of Angela Merkel, she also joined her fellow Western democrats’ show of unanimous disdain for the Macedonian voters’ majority opinion, urging the country to “push ahead” with the implementation of the majority-rejected accord, citing voters’ “overwhelming support” [sic], and arguing through the mouth of her spokesman that the required 50% + 1 turnout was actually “very high,” as voter registers purportedly included many people who had long since left the country.

Coincidentally (?), the same argument was used by Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, who opined that the “yes” votes cast in the referendum do, in fact, “represent the majority despite the low turnout because Macedonia does not have the 1.8 million voters entered into its electoral rolls but just 1.2 million since 300,000 people have left the country since the voter lists were last updated 20 years ago.” The fallacy of his reality-challenged claim is easily exposed if we just take a glance at the results of Macedonia’s last parliamentary elections (December 2016), in which voter turnout was just under 1.2 million (1,191,832 to be exact) or, officially, 66.79%. If we were to believe Kotzias and Merkel (who lodged no objections at the time), that would have meant that the turnout for the 2016 elections had been 99% – a figure that would make any totalitarian dictator blush with envy. On the other hand, since those elections did produce the “desired result,” enabling the current heavily pro-NATO/EU government led by Zoran Zaev to be formed, that automatically made them “valid” in the eyes of the high priests of democracy in Brussels, Berlin, London and Washington.

Needless to say, Zaev joined his Western patrons’ charade, hailing the referendum as a “democratic success,” and announcing that he would seek the Macedonian Parliament’s support to amend the constitution and get the agreement with Greece ratified (according to the so-called Prespa Agreement, the Macedonian Parliament must adopt the necessary constitutional amendments by the end of 2018) so that the Greek Parliament can do the same, which would seal the deal. However, Zaev and his Albanian political partners are currently well short of the necessary two-thirds majority (reportedly, they can count on 71 deputies, or 9 short of the needed 80), and will have to call early elections if they don’t soon succeed in securing it.

Yet, let it not go unsaid that Zaev was singing a rather different tune prior to the referendum, assuring that “citizens will make the decision,” and that Parliament would vote on the necessary constitutional changes only if the referendum is successful. But that was then, when confidence was still high that the usual combination of Western pressure, money and overwhelming domination of the media spectrum would get the job done. And then reality struck on September 30…

Still, amidst all the faux cheer and public displays of confidence of the pro-NATO/EU crowd, a palpable sense of unease hangs in the air. As a Deutsche Welle opinion piece put it, the “low voter turnout for Macedonia’s referendum is a bad starting point for the country’s future development.” And, according to DW in Serbian, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commentary warned that “politicians who otherwise ceaselessly talk of democracy as a ‘special value’ should not call on the parliament in Skopje to accept the voting results.” In other words, Macedonia’s people (read – a large majority of the majority Slavic population) have “voted with their feet” and rejected the agreement, and no new parliamentary election, no matter the results, can change that unpleasant-but-immutable fact. That alone will delegitimize any Western-led effort to “manufacture consent” by ramming the agreement through the present or future Parliament – although, as we know, NATO doesn’t put too much stock in referenda anyway, while the EU is not averse to making citizens vote as many times as needed to obtain the “right” result.

But the West has lost more than just legitimacy in Macedonia – it has damaged its reputation, perhaps irretrievably. In the words of former presidential advisor Cvetin Chilimanov,

“The West has humiliated us… Macedonians have rejected this media, psychological, political and propaganda aggression against the people, and that’s the tragedy of these days, that a large percentage of a people that had been genuinely oriented towards the West has changed its mind and stopped looking at the West as something democratic, something progressive and successful… That is the reason for the boycott. Pressure was applied against Macedonia, a country that had always been open to ties with the West, but which did not want to make this disgusting compromise and humiliate itself before the neighboring countries, before Western countries. We did not understand why that humiliation was needed so that we might become a member of Europe. What’s worst, perhaps that is now the thinking of a silent majority of the people, that they won’t forget this insult and this attack on Macedonia.” 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2ybm69N Tyler Durden

China is developing a dual-purpose laser-equipped low-Earth orbit satellite. The program was launched earlier this year, is aimed at increasing Chinese surveillance of maritime traffic and unparallel anti-submarine warfare detection in the world’s oceans.

Project Guanlan, meaning “watching the big waves,” was launched in May at the Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology in Qingdao, a city in eastern Shandong Province on the east coast of China, said South China Morning Post.

It is an ambitious project that the US and Russia have failed to acquire fully. China aims to boost its surveillance activities in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea, Sea of Japan, and the Phillippine Sea, according to the laboratory’s website.

Researchers are currently working on the satellite’s design at the laboratory, but its lasers and internal components are being developed by 20 research institutes and universities across the country.

Song Xiaoquan, a researcher involved in the project, said if the program is successful, it will enable China to surveil the upper layer of the Ocean.

“It will change almost everything,” Song said.

For several decades, countries around the world have been trying to develop a device to detect submarines using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology. Both the US and Russia have tools that can recognize submarines 300 feet below the surface of the sea. But this is not enough, as most superpowers have subs that operate at depths of 1,600 feet.

Recently, NASA and Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency funded projects that could see submarines up to 600 feet below the surface — but still nowhere close to the 1600 feet target zone.

Lasers that penetrate 1,600 feet depth remain a pipedream for major superpowers. China is attempting to realize this dream.

Once Project Guanlan’s laser components are assembled. A pilot test of the device could be mounted on a spy plane as well as surveillance satellites.

Shooting a laser beam from space has been difficult as the beam tends to degrade in the atmosphere and various layers of the ocean. Sunrays do not go more than 600 feet deep in the oceanic water.

Once completed, Project Guanlan could be manufactured by the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shaanxi province.

Zhang Tinglu, another fellow researcher, involved in the project, said the primary obstacle for the satellite was the thermocline, a thin layer of water where the temperature changes abruptly, which degrades the effectiveness of the laser.

Tinglu declined to elaborate on the future of the satellite but noted that thermocline is known to be important for submarine captains because it can reflect active sonar and other acoustic signals. That means a sub could potentially avoid detection in the thermocline, but not by a laser beam.

Song, Tinglu, and or the lab did not give the South China Morning Post any indication as to when the laser will be completed. Song did say the team has been under pressure. “There’s still heaps of problems that we need to solve,” he added.

Since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, China has been investing heavily in military hardware, including anti-submarine technology, as it militarizes the South China Sea.

With the possible development of Chinese lasers in low-Earth orbit detecting American and allied subs in oceanic waters could be a game-changer in geo-strategic one-upmanship competition as the new Cold War between US-China is a major theme for 2020 and beyond.

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

Attorneys representing Christine Blasey Ford sharply condemned the FBI background investigation into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh late Wednesday, after the agency signaled that their probe was over without interviewing Ford, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed for a Friday cloture – a key procedural vote that will pave the way for Kavanaugh’s final confirmation.

BREAKING: Senate Majority Leader McConnell files cloture to continue Senate confirmation process for Judge Kavanaugh, setting up debate, followed by weekend voting on the nomination. pic.twitter.com/d4XwBVK8KF (NBC News)

— Frank Macek, WKYC Sr. Director (@frankmacekwkyc) October 4, 2018

“An FBI supplemental background investigation that did not include an interview of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford– nor the witnesses who corroborate her testimony– cannot be called an investigation,” said Ford’s attorneys in a statement. “We are profoundly disappointed that after the tremendous sacrifice she made in coming forward, those directing the FBI investigation were not interested in seeking the truth.”

Two senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee told Fox News on Wednesday that they’ve been instructed to plan on voting Sunday. 

Sources previously told Fox News that Senators and some aides would be able to start looking at the FBI’s background investigation on Thursday morning and that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and committee member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would be given the first chance to look at the report.

The bureau’s investigation, ordered last week by President Trump, was designed to look into allegations of sexual misconduct leveled at Kavanaugh, who has been accused by three women of separate alleged incidents. Christine Blasey Ford, the first woman to come foward, testified before the Senate Judiciary last week about her claims. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations against him. –Fox News

McConnell statement on cloture: pic.twitter.com/g8T4wWQQbc

— Alex Leary (@learyreports) October 4, 2018

On Wednesday night, President Trump tweeted: “Wow, such enthusiasm and energy for Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Look at the Energy, look at the Polls. Something very big is happening. He is a fine man and great intellect. The country is with him all the way!” 

Wow, such enthusiasm and energy for Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Look at the Energy, look at the Polls. Something very big is happening. He is a fine man and great intellect. The country is with him all the way!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 4, 2018

Earlier Wednesday we reported that the FBI was essentially finished with their supplemental report on sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, after which they will send a single copy to Capitol Hill where it will be held in a Senate Judiciary Committee safe, two senior Senate sources told Fox News. 

***

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Il), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said that preparations are underway to review the report on Thursday, while Republicans are putting strict limits on the viewing. 

According to Durbin, the one copy will be taken from the safe and made available to senators – with each party taking turns viewing it in one-hour increments. 

“Get this — one copy! For the United States Senate,” he said. “That’s what we were told. And we were also that we would be given one hour for the Dems, one hour for the Republicans. Alternating.

“We tried to reserve some time to read it. That is ridiculous,” he said. “One copy?!”

“Bizarre, it doesn’t make any sense,” he added. –The Hill

A senior Democratic aide confirmed the restrictive viewing conditions to The Hill, which notes that if all 100 senators decide to review the document and it takes each senator 30 minutes to read it, it could take up to 50 hours for the entire chamber to examine it. 

“Do the math,” said Durbin. “That’s a lot of time.”

Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) says that Senators will be able to view the FBI report in the “secure compartmented information facility” in the Capitol Visitor Center, which is large enough to hold a large group of senators. Corker has urged Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to make several copies. 

Republican aides, however, say that alternating a single copy of an FBI background report between parties is typical practice for judicial nominees. 

Judiciary Committee Republicans on Tuesday tweeted out a 2009 memorandum of understanding stating that photocopying or other reproduction of the FBI background reports is prohibited.

It also states that notes and memoranda derived from the contents of the FBI background investigation reports may be made and shall be destroyed or secured in the same manner as the reports themselves.

Reports are considered confidential Senate Judiciary Committee documents and unauthorized disclosure of them is subject to punishment under the Senate rules. –The Hill

It is unclear whether any of the FBI report will be made public, however Senator John Thune (R-SD), the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, told Fox News that “some of it will probably make its way out into the public and into the mainstream.” 

“But most importantly, at least right now, is that all senators who are going to have the responsibility to vote on this nomination have an opportunity to review it, assess it and come to their own conclusions about what’s in there.”

And regardless of what the FBI concludes, we anticipate it won’t satisfy Democrats, who are already up in arms over the fact that the agency didn’t interview Kavanaugh accuser, Christine Blasey Ford or Kavanaugh as part of the probe, with sources saying that their congressional testimony last week was sufficient. 

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

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”—Philip K. Dick

It’s a given that Big Brother is always watching us.

Unfortunately, thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Big Brother (and his corporate partners in crime) is getting even creepier and more invasive, intrusive and stalker-like.

Indeed, every dystopian sci-fi film (and horror film, for that matter) we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science and technology, Big Business, and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful—but not without help from the citizenry.

On a daily basis, Americans are relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

As journalist Anna Myers notes, “Fingerprint readers, eye scans, and voice recognition are no longer just the security methods of high-tech spy movies. Millions of mobile phone, bank, and investment customers now have these technologies at their fingertips. Schwab uses voice recognition, Apple uses fingerprints, Wells Fargo scans eyes, and other companies are developing heartbeat or grip technology to verify user identity. Whether biometric technology will thrive or meet its demise depends not only on the security of the technology, but also whether the U.S. legal system will adapt to provide the privacy protections necessary for consumers to use it and for companies to invest in its development. Currently there is no federal law and only one state with a law protecting biometric information.”

Translation: thus far, the courts have done little to preserve our rights in the face of technologies and government programs that have little respect for privacy or freedom.

Consider all the ways we continue to be tracked, hunted, hounded, and stalked by the government and its dubious agents:

By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say.

By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write.

By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go.

By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do.

By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. 

By mapping your biometrics—your “face-print”—and storing the information in a massive, shared government database available to bureaucratic agencies, police and the military, the government’s goal is to use facial recognition software to identify you (and every other person in the country) and track your movements, wherever you go.

And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

Of course, none of these technologies are foolproof.

Nor are they immune from tampering, hacking or user bias.

Nevertheless, they have become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to render null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Consequently, no longer are we “innocent until proven guilty” in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals.

Increasingly, we are all guilty until proven innocent as the government’s questionable acquisition and use of biometrics and DNA to identify individuals and “solve” crimes makes clear.

Indeed, for years now, the FBI and Justice Department have conspired to acquire near-limitless power and control over biometric information collected on law-abiding individuals, millions of whom have never been accused of a crime. 

Going far beyond the scope of those with criminal backgrounds, the FBI’s Next Generation Identification database (NGID), a billion dollar boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government’s ID database from a fingerprint system to a vast data storehouse of iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.

Launched in 2008, the NGID is a massive biometric database that contains more than 100 million fingerprints and 45 million facial photos gathered from a variety of sources ranging from criminal suspects and convicts to daycare workers and visa applicants, including millions of people who have never committed or even been accused of a crime.

In other words, innocent American citizens are now automatically placed in a suspect database.

For a long time, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s biometrics and DNA and use it against them. 

That is no longer the case.

The information is being amassed through a variety of routine procedures, with the police leading the way as prime collectors of biometrics for something as non-threatening as a simple moving violation. The nation’s courts are also doing their part to “build” the database, requiring biometric information as a precursor to more lenient sentences. And of course Corporate America has made it so easy to use one’s biometrics to access everything from bank accounts to cell phones.

We’ve made it so easy for the government to target, identify and track us—dead or alive.

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

For instance, in March 2018, Florida police showed up at a funeral home, asked to see the corpse of 30-year-old Linus F. Phillip, and attempted to use the dead man’s finger to unlock his cell phone using his biometric fingerprint. (It turns out, cops unlocking cell phones with dead people’s fingerprints is now relatively common.)

In 2016, the Department of Justice secured a warrant allowing police to enter a California residence and “force anyone inside to use their biometric information to open their mobile devices.”

Two years earlier, in 2014, a Virginia court “declared it legal to use criminal suspects’ fingerprints to open up smartphones.”

This doesn’t even touch on the many ways in which the government is using our DNA against us, the Constitution be damned.

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it comes to their DNA.

Although Glenn Raynor, a suspected rapist, willingly agreed to be questioned by police, he refused to provide them with a DNA sample.

No problem: Police simply swabbed the chair in which Raynor had been sitting and took what he refused to voluntarily provide. Raynor’s DNA was a match, and the suspect became a convict. In refusing to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its tacit approval for government agents to collect shed DNA, likening it to a person’s fingerprints or the color of their hair, eyes or skin.

Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving. 

It’s what police like to refer to as a “modern fingerprint.” 

However, unlike a fingerprint, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.”

With such a powerful tool at their disposal, it was inevitable that the government’s collection of DNA would become a slippery slope toward government intrusion.

Certainly, it was difficult enough trying to protect our privacy in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Maryland v. King that likened DNA collection to photographing and fingerprinting suspects when they are booked, thereby allowing the government to take DNA samples from people merely “arrested” in connection with “serious” crimes.

At that time, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that as a result of the Court’s ruling, “your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

Now, Americans are vulnerable to the government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their knowledge or permission.

As the dissenting opinion in Raynor for the Maryland Court of Appeals rightly warned, “a person desiring to keep her DNA profile private, must conduct her public affairs in a hermetically sealed hazmat suit…. The Majority’s holding means that a person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver’s license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.”

All 50 states now maintain their own DNA databases, although the protocols for collection differ from state to state. That DNA is also being collected in the FBI’s massive national DNA database, code-named CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), which was established as a way to identify and track convicted felons and has since become a de facto way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.

Indeed, hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of newborns. However, in many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely.

What this means for those being born today is inclusion in a government database that contains intimate information about who they are, their ancestry, and what awaits them in the future, including their inclinations to be followers, leaders or troublemakers.

For the rest of us, it’s just a matter of time before the government gets hold of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in connection with law enforcement and corporate America, or through the collection of our “shed” or “touch” DNA.

While much of the public debate, legislative efforts and legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped through without much debate or opposition.

Yet as scientist Leslie A. Pray notes:

We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically everywhere we go. Forensic scientists use DNA left behind on cigarette butts, phones, handles, keyboards, cups, and numerous other objects, not to mention the genetic content found in drops of bodily fluid, like blood and semen. In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases. Or, if the future scenario depicted at the beginning of this article is any indication, shed DNA is also free for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.

What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database, albeit it may be a file without a name. 

In other words, you’re a suspect to be watched.

As Forensic magazine reports, “As officers have become more aware of touch DNA’s potential, they are using it more and more. Unfortunately, some [police] have not been selective enough when they process crime scenes. Instead, they have processed anything and everything at the scene, submitting 150 or more samples for analysis.”

Even old samples taken from crime scenes and “cold” cases are being unearthed and mined for their DNA profiles.

Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing, analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots” for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.

If you haven’t yet connected the dots, let me point the way.

Having already used surveillance technology to render the entire American populace potential suspects, DNA technology in the hands of government will complete our transition to a suspect society in which we are all merely waiting to be matched up with a crime.

No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty. Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup until circumstances and science say otherwise.

Of course, there will be those who point to DNA’s positive uses in criminal justice, such as in those instances where it is used to absolve someone on death row of a crime he didn’t commit, and there is no denying its beneficial purposes at times.

However, as is the case with body camera footage and every other so-called technology that is hailed as a “check” on government abuses, in order for the average person—especially one convicted of a crime—to request and get access to DNA testing, they first have to embark on a costly, uphill legal battle through red tape and, even then, they are opposed at every turn by a government bureaucracy run by prosecutors, legislatures and law enforcement.

What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no defense of against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails and text messages.

Yet if there are no limits to government officials being able to access your DNA and all that it says about you, then where do you draw the line?

As technology makes it ever easier for the government to tap into our thoughts, our memories, our dreams, suddenly the landscape becomes that much more dystopian.

With the entire governmental system shifting into a pre-crime mode aimed at detecting and pursuing those who “might” commit a crime before they have an inkling, let alone an opportunity, to do so, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a scenario in which government agents (FBI, local police, etc.) target potential criminals based on their genetic disposition to be a “troublemaker” or their relationship to past dissenters.

Equally disconcerting: if scientists can, using DNA, track salmon across hundreds of square miles of streams and rivers, how easy will it be for government agents to not only know everywhere we’ve been and how long we were at each place but collect our easily shed DNA and add it to the government’s already burgeoning database?

It’s not just yourself you have to worry about, either.

It’s also anyone related to you who can be connected by DNA.

These genetic fingerprints, as they’re called, do more than just single out a person. They also show who you’re related to and how. As the Associated Press reports, “DNA samples that can help solve robberies and murders could also, in theory, be used to track down our relatives, scan us for susceptibility to disease, or monitor our movements.”

Capitalizing on this, police in California, Colorado, Virginia and Texas use DNA found at crime scenes to identify and target family members for possible clues to a suspect’s whereabouts.

Who will protect your family from being singled out for “special treatment” simply because they’re related to you? As biomedical researcher Yaniv Erlich warns, “If it’s not regulated and the police can do whatever they want … they can use your DNA to infer things about your health, your ancestry, whether your kids are your kids.”

For that matter, how do you protect yourself against having your DNA extracted, your biometrics scanned and the most intimate details of who you are—your biological footprint—uploaded into a government database? 

What recourse do you have when that information, taken against your will, is shared, stolen, sold or compromised, as it inevitably will be in this age of hackers? We know that databases can be compromised. We’ve seen it happen to databases kept by health care companies, motor vehicle agencies, financial institutions, retailers and intelligence agencies such as the NSA.

And what about those cases in which the technology proved to be wrong, either through human error or tampering?

It happens more often than we are told.

For example, David Butler spent eight months in prison for a murder he didn’t commit after his DNA was allegedly found on the murder victim and surveillance camera footage placed him in the general area the murder took place. Conveniently, Butler’s DNA was on file after he had voluntarily submitted it during an investigation years earlier into a robbery at his mother’s home.

The case seemed cut and dried to everyone but Butler who proclaimed his innocence.

Except that the DNA evidence and surveillance footage was wrong: Butler was innocent.

That Butler’s DNA was supposedly found on the victim’s nails was attributed to three things: one, Butler was a taxi driver “and so it was possible for his DNA to be transferred from his taxi via money or another person, onto the murder victim”; two, Butler had a rare skin condition causing him to shed flakes of skin—i.e., more DNA to spread around, much more so than the average person; and three, police wanted him to be the killer, despite the fact that “the DNA sample was only a partial match, of poor quality, and experts at the time said they could neither say that he was guilty nor rule him out.”

Unfortunately, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, convicted and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. 

This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

While the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent government officials from searching an individual’s person or property without a warrant and probable cause—evidence that some kind of criminal activity was afoot—the founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy on a cellular level.

Yet that’s exactly what we are lacking.

Once again, technology has outdistanced both our understanding of it and our ability to adequately manage the consequences of unleashing it on an unsuspecting populace.

In the end, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what all of this amounts to is a carefully crafted campaign designed to give the government access to and control over what it really wants: you.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2IC5IUD Tyler Durden

 

It wasn’t a case of flagrant carpetbagging – it was just an honest mistake!

That’s the excuse that one Democratic Congressional candidate in California has offered to justify the fact that he claimed a home in Bethesda Maryland as his primary residence, as the Fresno Bee reported on Tuesday.

Spokesmen for the campaign of TJ Cox – the candidate in question – said last week that the claim was the result of an “honest mistake” and blamed an error by the state for the “oversight.” Cox has offered to repay a roughly $700 tax credit that he received by claiming the home.

Cox owns several businesses in the central San Joaquin Valley and is running against Republican Rep. David Valadao for California’s 21st Congressional District seat.

The Bee had previously reported that Cox owned a three-bedroom, four-bathroom house in Bethesda and had claimed the nearly $1 million home as his principal residence. Cox also claimed a Fresno home as his principal residence, however, federal tax laws prohibit claiming more than one home.

Asked why Cox didn’t notice the oversight, his campaign spokesperson said that Cox’s family was living there.

“It was an honest mistake that he filled out the principal residence not knowing the legal definitions. His family was living there,” said Campaign Spokesman Phillip Vander Klay.

“That’s just kind of the situation,” Vander Klay added. “We are working to get this fixed.”

Cox had reportedly purchased the Bethesda home for his family to live in while his wife, Dr. Kathleen Murphy, studied public health policy at Johns Hopkins University. Cox lived and worked in Fresno while his family lived in Maryland.

Though Cox’s campaign tried to construe the tax credit claim as a mistake on the state of Maryland’s part, the Fresno Bee found that it had been coded as Cox’s principal residence when he first bought the home – meaning that the credit claim was an oversight on Cox’s part.

But we’re sure that Cox’s inability to keep track of basic tax-related upkeep will have no bearing on his ability to properly allocate how the tax dollars of his constituents are spent.

 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2P7b6BB Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

In my September 24 column, “Truth Is Evaporating Before Our Eyes,”  I used the destruction of the CBS news team that broke the Abu Ghraib story and the story of President George W. Bush’s non-performance of his Texas Air Force National Guard duties to demonstrate how accusations alone could destroy a Peabody Award winning, 26 year veteran producer of CBS News, Mary Mapes, and the established news anchor Dan Rather.

I have many times written that it was President Bill Clinton who destroyed the independent US media when he permitted 90 percent of the US media to be concentrated in six mega-corporations that were in the entertainment and other businesses and not in the news business. This unprecedented concentration of media was against all American tradition and destroyed the reliance that our Founding Fathers placed on a free press to keep government accountable to the people.

Until I read Mary Mapes book, Truth and Duty (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), I was unaware of how this monopolization of the media in violation of the Sherman Anti-trust Act and American tradition had proceeded to destroy honest reporting.

Here is what happened.

The Texas Air National Guard was a place the elite placed their sons to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Copies of documents written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian describing George W. Bush’s ability to jump the large waiting list hoping to avoid the war, Bush’s non-compliance with National Guard requirements and Bush’s unauthorized departure to another state were given to CBS. The CBS team worked for many months to confirm or discredit the documents. The information in the documents proved to be consistent with the interviews of people acquainted with George W. Bush’s time in the Texas National Guard.

It was a carefully prepared story, not a rushed one, and it fits all the information we now have of Bush’s non-performance.

The problem for the CBS news team, which might not have been realized at the time, was that the documents were copies, not originals that experts could authenicate as real beyond question. Therefore, although the documents were consistent with the testimony of others, no expert could validate the documents as they could originals.

The Republicans seized on this chink in the armor to turn the issue away from the truthfulness of the CBS 60 Minutes report to whether or not the copies were fakes.

CBS had two other problems. One was that Viacom, its owner, was not in the news business, but in the lobbying business in Washington wanting to enrich the company with legislative perks and regulatory permissions. Truthful news from CBS, exposing US torture in the face of the Bush regime’s denials and showing that Bush was too privileged to be held accountable by the Texas National Guard, was damaging Viacom’s highly paid lobbying effort.

When the right-wing bloggers took after CBS, the Viacom executives saw how to get rid of the troublesome CBS news team. Viacom executives refused to support their reporters and convened a kangeroo count consisting of Republicans to “investigate” the 60 Minutes story of Bush’s failure to comply with his obligations to the Texas National Guard.

Viacom wanted to get rid of the independent news constraint on its lobbying success, but Mary Mapes and her lawyers thought truth meant something and would prevail. Therefore, she subjected herself to the destructive process of watching the orchestrated destruction of her career and her integrity.

CBS’ other problem was that, with or without justification, CBS and Dan Rather were regarded in conservative Republican circles as liberal, a designation equivalent to a communist. For millions of Americans the controversy was about liberal CBS trying to harm George W. Bush and leave us exposed to Muslim Terrorism. In right-wing minds, Bush was trying to protect America from Muslim terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and CBS was trying to smear President Bush.

Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, and the CBS news team were too focused on news to take into account the dangerous situation in which they were operating. Therefore, they walked into a trap that served Dick Cheney’s Middle Eastern wars, which served Halliburton and Israel, and into a trap that served conservative hatred of “liberal” news.

Why didn’t the American media defend CBS’ careful reporting? The answer is that this was a time when TV news media was dying. The Internet was taking over. The rest of the media saw in the demise of CBS a chance to gain that market and have a longer life.

So the rest of the media took up the fake news that 60 Minutes had presented a report based on fake documents. The media did not realize that they were signing their own death warants. Neither did the right-wing bloggers that the Republicans had sicced on CBS. Today, these bloggers are themselves shut off from being able to express any truth.

Truth in America is being exterminated, and the destruction of CBS news was the starting point. As Mary Mapes reports in her book, as soon as Viacom was entirely rid of 60 Minutes with the firing of the entire staff, on the very next day Viacom held a triumphant annual investor meeting. Chairman Sumner Redstone was awarded a a $56 million paycheck for 2004. Chief operating officers, Les Moonves and Tom Freston “each pocketed a whoopping fifty-two million for the year.”

And the CBS news team went without mortgage, car, or health insurance payments.

Mapes writes:

“Just a few years ago, this kind of corporate executive largesse was unherd of. Now, these media Masters of the Universe have taken over the public airwares and they have one obligation: making a profit.”

Ever a larger one, which requires protecting the government and the corporate advertisers from investigative reporting.

The consequence today is that the American media is totally unreliable. No reader can rely on any report, not even on a New York Times obituary.

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

“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it,” George Carlin.

Many are conditioned from birth to believe that America is the land of equal opportunity, but an online data tool offered to the public for the first time on Monday shows how far the distance can be between where you are… and the American dream.

This map, a screenshot from The Opportunity Atlas, a big data and analytics firm – empowering policymakers and civic leaders to create targeted local policy solutions that revive the American Dream, shows household income in 2014-2015 for 20.5 million Americans born between 1978-1983 who are in their mid-thirties today. In areas that are redder, people who grew up in low-income households tended to stay low-income. In the regions that are bluer, people who grew up in low-income households tend to achieve the dream.

According to NPR, Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and a team of researchers created this tool – the first of its kind because it blends US Census Bureau data with data from the Internal Revenue Service. The findings are compelling and show the missing link between geographical area and economic mobility.

Chetty said that people born in the 1940s or ’50s were guaranteed the American dream, but today, for much of the millennials, it is more of a fantasy.

“You see that for kids turning 30 today, who were born in the mid-1980s, only 50% of them go on to earn more than their parents did,” Chetty says. “It’s a coin flip as to whether you are now going to achieve the American dream.”

Researchers hope this map will aid communities and knock down barriers that prevent people from climbing the economic ladder. They want policymakers to use this data and offer new solutions on a localized level.

Chetty explains the information can help pinpoint regions where younger generations are climbing the income ladder and “the places where the outcomes don’t look as good.” He also found that if a person moves out of a neighborhood with worse prospects into to a neighborhood with better outlooks, that move increases lifetime earnings for low-income children by an average $200,000.

For instance, the household parent income in Cockeysville/Hunt Valley, Maryland is $62,000, but just roughly 20 miles south in decaying Baltimore City, some parts have a parent household income of approximately $19,000 to $29,000. In the last decade, politicians in Maryland have attempted to smooth out the massive inequality in the region by providing Section 8 (housing) to low-income city folks in the county. The report did not touch on Baltimore flight, as many have escaped the opioid and murder-plagued city, the population has hit a 100-year low, exacerbating the inequalities divided by a city/county line. As for Baltimore, obtaining the American Dream depends on if your parents are living in the city or county.

Glancing at the Rust Belt and Southern US, decades of de-industrialization have decimated the household income of parents, virtually erasing the prospects of obtaining the American Dream for millennials. From Michigan to Georgia, parent household incomes are some of the lowest in the nation.

The next view is San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where the region has become a widely accepted center of the computer industry since the 1970s. Tech has been influential in the modern economy, thus boosting parent household incomes in the region. In return, strong households have provided an easy glide for millennials to climb the ladder and obtain the American Dream.

Last month, we explained more than 80% of American families define the American Dream as financial security and homeownership, and more than half think this dream is unattainable, according to the latest State of the American Family Study released by MassMutual.

The bottom 90% of Americans (remember the middle class was wiped out) are trapped with insurmountable debts, including auto loans, credit card debts, payday loans, and student loans. Only one if four families have enough emergency savings to cover more than six months of expenses.

The American Dream is starting to look a lot different than before. This time around, there is no white picket fence, and if you were to believe the American Dream — you would need to live in a high-income zip code.

As for the majority of Americans (living ex. high-income zip codes), the land of equal opportunity does not exist.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2xX0i2G Tyler Durden

Authored by Friedrich Hayek via The Mises Institute,

In all democratic countries, in the United States even more than elsewhere, a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible. This is no doubt true of the power of intellectuals to make their peculiar opinions of the moment influence decisions, of the extent to which they can sway the popular vote on questions on which they differ from the current views of the masses. Yet over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion.

In the light of recent history it is somewhat curious that this decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas should not yet be more generally recognized. The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.

In every country that has moved toward socialism, the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals. In Germany this stage had been reached toward the end of the last century; in England and France, about the time of the first World War. To the casual observer it would seem as if the United States had reached this phase after World War II and that the attraction of a planned and directed economic system is now as strong among the American intellectuals as it ever was among their German or English fellows. Experience suggests that, once this phase has been reached, it is merely a question of time until the views now held by the intellectuals become the governing force of politics.

The character of the process by which the views of the intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow is therefore of much more than academic interest. Whether we merely wish to foresee or attempt to influence the course of events, it is a factor of much greater importance than is generally understood. What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles. Paradoxically enough, however, in general only the parties of the Left have done most to spread the belief that it was the numerical strength of the opposing material interests which decided political issues, whereas in practice these same parties have regularly and successfully acted as if they understood the key position of the intellectuals. Whether by design or driven by the force of circumstances, they have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this “elite,” while the more conservative groups have acted, as regularly but unsuccessfully, on a more naive view of mass democracy and have usually vainly tried directly to reach and to persuade the individual voter.

The term “intellectuals,” however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the secondhand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not understood. Even persons who use the word “intellectual” mainly as a term of abuse are still inclined to withhold it from many who undoubtedly perform that characteristic function. This is neither that of the original thinker nor that of the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.

Until one begins to list all the professions and activities which belong to the class, it is difficult to realize how numerous it is, how the scope for activities constantly increases in modern society, and how dependent on it we all have become. The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists all of whom may be masters of the technique of conveying ideas but are usually amateurs so far as the substance of what they convey is concerned. The class also includes many professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge of their own subjects, are listened with respect on most others. There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class; and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men, dependent for our information and instruction on those who make it their job to keep abreast of opinion. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.

The layman, perhaps, is not fully aware to what extent even the popular reputations of scientists and scholars are made by that class and are inevitably affected by its views on subjects which have little to do with the merits of the real achievements. And it is specially significant for our problem that every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as “progressive” political views; but I have yet to come across a single instance where such a scientific pseudo-reputation has been bestowed for political reason on a scholar of more conservative leanings. This creation of reputations by the intellectuals is particularly important in the fields where the results of expert studies are not used by other specialists but depend on the political decision of the public at large. There is indeed scarcely a better illustration of this than the attitude which professional economists have taken to the growth of such doctrines as socialism or protectionism. There was probably at no time a majority of economists, who were recognized as such by their peers, favorable to socialism (or, for that matter, to protection). In all probability it is even true to say that no other similar group of students contains so high a proportion of its members decidedly opposed to socialism (or protection). This is the more significant as in recent times it is as likely as not that it was an early interest in socialist schemes for reform which led a man to choose economics for his profession. Yet it is not the predominant views of the experts but the views of a minority, mostly of rather doubtful standing in their profession, which are taken up and spread by the intellectuals.

The all-pervasive influence of the intellectuals in contemporary society is still further strengthened by the growing importance of “organization.” It is a common but probably mistaken belief that the increase of organization increases the influence of the expert or specialist. This may be true of the expert administrator and organizer, if there are such people, but hardly of the expert in any particular field of knowledge. It is rather the person whose general knowledge is supposed to qualify him to appreciate expert testimony, and to judge between the experts from different fields, whose power is enhanced. The point which is important for us, however, is that the scholar who becomes a university president, the scientist who takes charge of an institute or foundation, the scholar who becomes an editor or the active promoter of an organization serving a particular cause, all rapidly cease to be scholars or experts and become intellectuals, solely in the light of certain fashionable general ideas. The number of such institutions which breed intellectuals and increase their number and powers grows every day. Almost all the “experts” in the mere technique of getting knowledge over are, with respect to the subject matter which they handle, intellectuals and not experts.

In the sense in which we are using the term, the intellectuals are in fact a fairly new phenomenon of history. Though nobody will regret that education has ceased to be a privilege of the propertied classes, the fact that the propertied classes are no longer the best educated and the fact that the large number of people who owe their position solely to the their general education do not possess that experience of the working of the economic system which the administration of property gives, are important for understanding the role of the intellectual. Professor Schumpeter, who has devoted an illuminating chapter of his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy to some aspects of our problem, has not unfairly stressed that it is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs and the consequent absence of first hand knowledge of them which distinguishes the typical intellectual from other people who also wield the power of the spoken and written word. It would lead too far, however, to examine here further the development of this class and the curious claim which has recently been advanced by one of its theorists that it was the only one whose views were not decidedly influenced by its own economic interests. One of the important points that would have to be examined in such a discussion would be how far the growth of this class has been artificially stimulated by the law of copyright.

It is not surprising that the real scholar or expert and the practical man of affairs often feel contemptuous about the intellectual, are disinclined to recognize his power, and are resentful when they discover it. Individually they find the intellectuals mostly to be people who understand nothing in particular especially well and whose judgement on matters they themselves understand shows little sign of special wisdom. But it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate their power for this reason. Even though their knowledge may often be superficial and their intelligence limited, this does not alter the fact that it is their judgement which mainly determines the views on which society will act in the not too distant future. It is no exaggeration to say that, once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible. These intellectuals are the organs which modern society has developed for spreading knowledge and ideas, and it is their convictions and opinions which operate as the sieve through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses.

It is of the nature of the intellectual’s job that he must use his own knowledge and convictions in performing his daily task. He occupies his position because he possesses, or has had to deal from day to day with, knowledge which his employer in general does not possess, and his activities can therefore be directed by others only to a limited extent. And just because the intellectuals are mostly intellectually honest, it is inevitable that they should follow their own conviction whenever they have discretion and that they should give a corresponding slant to everything that passes through their hands. Even where the direction of policy is in the hands of men of affairs of different views, the execution of policy will in general be in the hands of intellectuals, and it is frequently the decision on the detail which determines the net effect. We find this illustrated in almost all fields of contemporary society. Newspapers in “capitalist” ownership, universities presided over by “reactionary” governing bodies, broadcasting systems owned by conservative governments, have all been known to influence public opinion in the direction of socialism, because this was the conviction of the personnel. This has often happened not only in spite of, but perhaps even because of, the attempts of those at the top to control opinion and to impose principles of orthodoxy.

The effect of this filtering of ideas through the convictions of a class which is constitutionally disposed to certain views is by no means confined to the masses. Outside his special field the expert is generally no less dependent on this class and scarcely less influenced by their selection. The result of this is that today in most parts of the Western World even the most determined opponents of socialism derive from socialist sources their knowledge on most subjects on which they have no firsthand information. With many of the more general preconceptions of socialist thought, the connection of their more practical proposals is by no means at once obvious; in consequence of that system of thought become in fact effective spreaders of its ideas. Who does not know the practical man who in his own field denounces socialism as “pernicious rot” but, when he steps outside his subject, spouts socialism like any left journalist? In no other field has the predominant influence of the socialist intellectuals been felt more strongly during the last hundred years than in the contacts between different national civilizations. It would go far beyond the limits of this article to trace the causes and significance of the highly important fact that in the modern world the intellectuals provide almost the only approach to an international community. It is this which mainly accounts for the extraordinary spectacle that for generations the supposedly “capitalist” West has been lending its moral and material support almost exclusively to those ideological movements in countries father east which aimed at undermining Western civilization and that, at the same time, the information which the Western public has obtained about events in Central and Eastern Europe has almost inevitably been colored by a socialist bias. Many of the “educational” activities of the American forces of occupation of Germany have furnished clear and recent examples of this tendency.

A proper understanding of the reasons which tend to incline so many of the intellectuals toward socialism is thus most important.

The first point here which those who do not share this bias ought to face frankly is that it is neither selfish interests nor evil intentions but mostly honest convictions and good intentions which determine the intellectual’s views. In fact, it is necessary to recognize that on the whole the typical intellectual is today more likely to be a socialist the more he his guided by good will and intelligence, and that on the plane of purely intellectual argument he will generally be able to make out a better case than the majority of his opponents within his class. If we still think him wrong, we must recognize that it may be genuine error which leads the well-meaning and intelligent people who occupy those key positions in our society to spread views which to us appear a threat to our civilization. Nothing could be more important than to try to understand the sources of this error in order that we should be able to counter it. Yet those who are generally regarded as the representatives of the existing order and who believe that they comprehend the dangers of socialism are usually very far from such understanding. They tend to regard the socialist intellectuals as nothing more than a pernicious bunch of highbrow radicals without appreciating their influence and, by their whole attitude to them, tend to drive them even further into opposition to the existing order.

If we are to understand this peculiar bias of a large section of intellectuals, we must be clear about two points. The first is that they generally judge all particular issues exclusively in the light of certain general ideas; the second, that the characteristic errors of any age are frequently derived from some genuine new truths it has discovered, and they are erroneous applications of new generalizations which have proved their value in other fields. The conclusion to which we shall be led by a full consideration of these facts will be that the effective refutation of such errors will frequently require further intellectual advance, and often advance on points which are very abstract and may seem very remote from the practical issues.

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. It is through their influence on him and on his choice of opinions on particular issues that the power of ideas for good and evil grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness. As he knows little about the particular issues, his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world. Yet this selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanschauung of a period, which will be favorable to the reception of some opinions and unfavorable to others and which will make the intellectual readily accept one conclusion and reject another without a real understanding of the issues.

In some respects the intellectual is indeed closer to the philosopher than to any specialist, and the philosopher is in more than one sense a sort of prince among the intellectuals. Although his influence is farther removed from practical affairs and correspondingly slower and more difficult to trace than that of the ordinary intellectual, it is of the same kind and in the long run even more powerful than that of the latter. It is the same endeavor toward a synthesis, pursued more methodically, the same judgement of particular views in so far as they fit into a general system of thought rather than by their specific merits, the same striving after a consistent world view, which for both forms the main basis for accepting or rejecting ideas. For this reason the philosopher has probably a greater influence over the intellectuals than any other scholar or scientist and, more than anyone else, determines the manner in which the intellectuals exercise their censorship function. The popular influence of the scientific specialist begins to rival that of the philosopher only when he ceases to be a specialist and commences to philosophize about the progress of his subject and usually only after he has been taken up by the intellectuals for reasons which have little to do with his scientific eminence.

The “climate of opinion” of any period is thus essentially a set of very general preconceptions by which the intellectual judges the importance of new facts and opinions. These preconceptions are mainly applications to what seem to him the most significant aspects of scientific achievements, a transfer to other fields of what has particularly impressed him in the work of the specialists. One could give a long list of such intellectual fashions and catchwords which in the course of two or three generations have in turn dominated the thinking of the intellectuals. Whether it was the “historical approach” or the theory of evolution, nineteenth century determinism and the belief in the predominant influence of environment as against heredity, the theory of relativity or the belief in the power of the unconscious- every one of these general conceptions has been made the touchstone by which innovations in different fields have been tested. It seems as if the less specific or precise (or the less understood) these ideas are, the wider may be their influence. Sometimes it is no more than a vague impression rarely put into words which thus wields a profound influence. Such beliefs as that deliberate control or conscious organization is also in social affairs always superior to the results of spontaneous processes which are not directed by a human mind, or that any order based on a plan laid down beforehand must be better than one formed by the balancing of opposing forces, have in this way profoundly affected political development.

Only apparently different is the role of the intellectuals where the development of more properly social ideas is concerned. Here their peculiar propensities manifest themselves in making shibboleths of abstractions, in rationalizing and carrying to extremes certain ambitions which spring from the normal intercourse of men. Since democracy is a good thing, the further the democratic principle can be carried, the better it appears to them. The most powerful of these general ideas which have shaped political development in recent times is of course the ideal of material equality. It is, characteristically, not one of the spontaneously grown moral convictions, first applied in the relations between particular individuals, but an intellectual construction originally conceived in the abstract and of doubtful meaning or application in particular instances. Nevertheless, it has operated strongly as a principle of selection among the alternative courses of social policy, exercising a persistent pressure toward an arrangement of social affairs which nobody clearly conceives. That a particular measure tends to bring about greater equality has come to be regarded as so strong a recommendation that little else will be considered. Since on each particular issue it is this one aspect on which those who guide opinion have a definite conviction, equality has determined social change even more strongly than its advocates intended.

Not only moral ideals act in this manner, however. Sometimes the attitudes of the intellectuals toward the problems of social order may be the consequence of advances in purely scientific knowledge, and it is in these instances that their erroneous views on particular issues may for a time seem to have all the prestige of the latest scientific achievements behind them. It is not in itself surprising that a genuine advance of knowledge should in this manner become on occasion a source of new error. If no false conclusions followed from new generalizations, they would be final truths which would never need revision. Although as a rule such a new generalization will merely share the false consequences which can be drawn from it with the views which were held before, and thus not lead to new error, it is quite likely that a new theory, just as its value is shown by the valid new conclusions to which it leads, will produce other new conclusions to which further advance will show to have been erroneous. But in such an instance a false belief will appear with all the prestige of the latest scientific knowledge supporting it. Although in the particular field to which this belief applies all the scientific evidence may be against it, it will nevertheless, before the tribunal of the intellectuals and in the light of the ideas which govern their thinking, be selected as the view which is best in accord with the spirit of the time. The specialists who will thus achieve public fame and wide influence will thus not be those who have gained recognition by their peers but will often be men whom the other experts regard as cranks, amateurs, or even frauds, but who in the eyes of the general public nevertheless become the best known exponents of their subject.

In particular, there can be little doubt that the manner in which during the last hundred years man has learned to organize the forces of nature has contributed a great deal toward the creation of the belief that a similar control of the forces of society would bring comparable improvements in human conditions. That, with the application of engineering techniques, the direction of all forms of human activity according to a single coherent plan should prove to be as successful in society as it has been in innumerable engineering tasks, is too plausible a conclusion not to seduce most of those who are elated by the achievement of the natural sciences. It must indeed be admitted both that it would require powerful arguments to counter the strong presumption in favor of such a conclusion and that these arguments have not yet been adequately stated. It is not sufficient to point out the defects of particular proposals based on this kind of reasoning. The argument will not lose its force until it has been conclusively shown why what has proved so eminently successful in producing advances in so many fields should have limits to its usefulness and become positively harmful if extended beyond these limits. This is a task which has not yet been satisfactorily performed and which will have to be achieved before this particular impulse toward socialism can be removed.

This, of course, is only one of many instances where further intellectual advance is needed if the harmful ideas at present current are to be refuted and where the course which we shall travel will ultimately be decided by the discussion of very abstract issues. It is not enough for the man of affairs to be sure, from his intimate knowledge of a particular field, that the theories of socialism which are derived from more general ideas will prove impracticable. He may be perfectly right, and yet his resistance will be overwhelmed and all the sorry consequences which he foresees will follow if his is not supported by an effective refutation of the idees meres. So long as the intellectual gets the better of the general argument, the most valid objections of the specific issue will be brushed aside.

This is not the whole story, however. The forces which influence recruitment to the ranks of the intellectuals operate in the same direction and help to explain why so many of the most able among them lean toward socialism. There are of course as many differences of opinion among intellectuals as among other groups of people; but it seems to be true that it is on the whole the more active, intelligent, and original men among the intellectuals who most frequently incline toward socialism, while its opponents are often of an inferior caliber. This is true particularly during the early stages of the infiltration of socialist ideas; later, although outside intellectual circles it may still be an act of courage to profess socialist convictions, the pressure of opinion among intellectuals will often be so strongly in favor of socialism that it requires more strength and independence for a man to resist it than to join in what his fellows regard as modern views. Nobody, for instance, who is familiar with large numbers of university faculties (and from this point of view the majority of university teachers probably have to be classed as intellectuals rather than as experts) can remain oblivious to the fact that the most brilliant and successful teachers are today more likely than not to be socialists, while those who hold more conservative political views are as frequently mediocrities. This is of course by itself an important factor leading the  younger generation into the socialist camp.

The socialist will, of course, see in this merely a proof that the more intelligent person is today bound to become a socialist. But this is far from being the necessary or even the most likely explanation. The main reason for this state of affairs is probably that, for the exceptionally able man who accepts the present order of society, a multitude of other avenues to influence and power are open, while to the disaffected and dissatisfied an intellectual career is the most promising path to both influence and the power to contribute to the achievement of his ideals. Even more than that: the more conservatively inclined man of first class ability will in general choose intellectual work (and the sacrifice in material reward which this choice usually entails) only if he enjoys it for its own sake. He is in consequence more likely to become an expert scholar rather than an intellectual in the specific sense of the word; while to the more radically minded the intellectual pursuit is more often than not a means rather than an end, a path to exactly that kind of wide influence which the professional intellectual exercises. It is therefore probably the fact, not that the more intelligent people are generally socialists but that a much higher proportion of socialists among the best minds devote themselves to those intellectual pursuits which in modern society give them a decisive influence on public opinion.

The selection of the personnel of the intellectuals is also closely connected with the predominant interest which they show in general and abstract ideas. Speculations about the possible entire reconstruction of society give the intellectual a fare much more to his taste than the more practical and short-run considerations of those who aim at a piecemeal improvement of the existing order. In particular, socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character; the very courage to indulge in Utopian thought is in this respect a source of strength to the socialists which traditional liberalism sadly lacks. This difference operates in favor of socialism, not only because speculation about general principles provides an opportunity for the play of the imagination of those who are unencumbered by much knowledge of the facts of present-day life, but also because it satisfies a legitimate desire for the understanding of the rational basis of any social order and gives scope for the exercise of that constructive urge for which liberalism, after it had won its great victories, left few outlets. The intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties. What appeal to him are the broad visions, the spacious comprehension of the social order as a whole which a planned system promises.

This fact that the tastes of the intellectual were better satisfied by the speculations of the socialists proved fatal to the influence of the liberal tradition. Once the basic demands of the liberal programs seemed satisfied, the liberal thinkers turned to problems of detail and tended to neglect the development of the general philosophy of liberalism, which in consequence ceased to be a live issue offering scope for general speculation. Thus for something over half a century it has been only the socialists who have offered anything like an explicit program of social development, a picture of the future society at which they were aiming, and a set of general principles to guide decisions on particular issues. Even though, if I am right, their ideals suffer from inherent contradictions, and any attempt to put them into practice must produce something utterly different from what they expect, this does not alter the fact that their program for change is the only one which has actually influenced the development of social institutions. It is because theirs has become the only explicit general philosophy of social policy held by a large group, the only system or theory which raises new problems and opens new horizons, that they have succeeded in inspiring the imagination of the intellectuals.

The actual developments of society during this period were determined, not by a battle of conflicting ideals, but by the contrast between an existing state of affairs and that one ideal of a possible future society which the socialists alone held up before the public. Very few of the other programs which offered themselves provided genuine alternatives. Most of them were mere compromises or half-way houses between the more extreme types of socialism and the existing order. All that was needed to make almost any socialist proposal appear reasonable to these “judicious” minds who were constitutionally convinced that the truth must always lie in the middle between the extremes, was for someone to advocate a sufficiently more extreme proposal. There seemed to exist only one direction in which we could move, and the only question seemed to be how fast and how far the movement should proceed.

The significance of the special appeal to the intellectuals which socialism derives from its speculative character will become clearer if we further contrast the position of the socialist theorist with that of his counterpart who is a liberal in the old sense of the word. This comparison will also lead us to whatever lesson we can draw from an adequate appreciation of the intellectual forces which are undermining the foundations of a free society.

Paradoxically enough, one of the main handicaps which deprives the liberal thinker of popular influence is closely connected with the fact that, until socialism has actually arrived, he has more opportunity of directly influencing decisions on current policy and that in consequence he is not only not tempted into that long-run speculation which is the strength of the socialists, but is actually discouraged from it because any effort of this kind is likely to reduce the immediate good he can do. Whatever power he has to influence practical decisions he owes to his standing with the representatives of the existing order, and this standing he would endanger if he devoted himself to the kind of speculation which would appeal to the intellectuals and which through them could influence developments over longer periods. In order to carry weight with the powers that be, he has to be “practical,” “sensible,” and “realistic.” So long as he concerns himself with the immediate issues, he is rewarded with influence, material success, and popularity with those who up to a point share his general outlook. But these men have little respect for those speculations on general principles which shape the intellectual climate. Indeed, if he seriously indulges in such long-run speculation, he is apt to acquire the reputation of being “unsound” or even half a socialist, because he is unwilling to identify the existing order with the free system at which he aims.

If, in spite of this, his efforts continue in the direction of general speculation, he soon discovers that it is unsafe to associate too closely with those who seem to share most of his convictions, and he is soon driven into isolation. Indeed there can be few more thankless tasks at present than the essential one of developing the philosophical foundation on which the further development of a free society must be based. Since the man who undertakes it must accept much of the framework of the existing order, he will appear to many of the more speculatively minded intellectuals merely as a timid apologist of things as they are; at the same time he will be dismissed by the men of affairs as an impractical theorist. He is not radical enough for those who know only the world where “with ease together dwell the thoughts” and much too radical for those who see only how “hard in space together clash the things.” If he takes advantage of such support as he can get from the men of affairs, he will almost certainly discredit himself with those on whom he depends for the spreading of his ideas. At the same time he will need most carefully to avoid anything resembling extravagance or overstatement. While no socialist theorist has ever been known to discredit himself with his fellows even by the silliest of proposals, the old-fashioned liberal will damn himself by an impracticable suggestion. Yet for the intellectuals he will still not be speculative or adventurous enough, and the changes and improvements in the social structure he will have to offer will seem limited in comparison with what their less restrained imagination conceives.

At least in a society in which the main requisites of freedom have already been won and further improvements must concern points of comparative detail, the liberal program can have none of the glamour of a new invention. The appreciation of the improvements it has to offer requires more knowledge of the working of the existing society than the average intellectual possesses. The discussion of these improvements must proceed on a more practical level than that of the more revolutionary programs, thus giving a complexion which has little appeal for the intellectual and tending to bring in elements to whom he feels directly antagonistic. Those who are most familiar with the working of the present society are also usually interested in the preservation of particular features of that society which may not be defensible on general principles. Unlike the person who looks for an entirely new future order and who naturally turns for guidance to the theorist, the men who believe in the existing order also usually think that they understand it much better than any theorist and in consequence are likely to reject whatever is unfamiliar and theoretical.

The difficulty of finding genuine and disinterested support for a systematic policy for freedom is not new. In a passage of which the reception of a recent book of mine has often reminded me, Lord Acton long ago described how “at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition….” More recently, one of the most distinguished living American economists has complained in a similar vein that the main task of those who believe in the basic principles of the capitalist system must frequently be to defend this system against the capitalists–indeed the great liberal economists, from Adam Smith to the present, have always known this. 

The most serious obstacle which separates the practical men who have the cause of freedom genuinely at heart from those forces which in the realm of ideas decide the course of development is their deep distrust of theoretical speculation and their tendency to orthodoxy; this, more than anything else, creates an almost impassable barrier between them and those intellectuals who are devoted to the same cause and whose assistance is indispensable if the cause is to prevail. Although this tendency is perhaps natural among men who defend a system because it has justified itself in practice, and to whom its intellectual justification seems immaterial, it is fatal to its survival because it deprives it of the support it most needs. Orthodoxy of any kind, any pretense that a system of ideas is final and must be unquestioningly accepted as a whole, is the one view which of necessity antagonizes all intellectuals, whatever their views on particular issues. Any system which judges men by the completeness of their conformity to a fixed set of opinions, by their “soundness” or the extent to which they can be relied upon to hold approved views on all points, deprives itself of a support without which no set of ideas can maintain its influence in modern society. The ability to criticize accepted views, to explore new vistas and to experience with new conceptions, provides the atmosphere without which the intellectual cannot breathe.

A cause which offers no scope for these traits can have no support from him and is thereby doomed in any society which, like ours, rests on his services. It may be that as a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends. There can be little doubt that in countries like the United States the ideal of freedom today has less real appeal for the young than it has in countries where they have learned what its loss means. On the other hand, there is every sign that in Germany and elsewhere, to the young men who have never known a free society, the task of constructing one can become as exciting and fascinating as any socialist scheme which has appeared during the last hundred years. It is an extraordinary fact, though one which many visitors have experienced, that in speaking to German students about the principles of a liberal society one finds a more responsive and even enthusiastic audience than one can hope to find in any of the Western democracies. In Britain also there is already appearing among the young a new interest in the principles of true liberalism which certainly did not exist a few years ago.

Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew? It may be so, but I hope it need not be. Yet, so long as the people who over longer periods determine public opinion continue to be attracted by the ideals of socialism, the trend will continue. If we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.

What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians. Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already underway in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?

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

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed a cloture on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh late Wednesday, paving the way for a Friday procedural vote and – if Kavanaugh clears the procedural hurdle – a final vote as early as Saturday.

McConnell touched off the process late Wednesday and announced that sometime during the evening, the FBI would deliver to an anxious Senate the potentially fateful document on claims that Kavanaugh sexually abused women, according to the AP. With Republicans clinging to a razor-thin 51-49 majority and five senators — including three Republicans — still vacillating, the conservative jurist’s prospects of Senate confirmation remained in doubt and potentially dependent on the file’s contents, which are supposed to be kept secret.

“There will be plenty of time for Members to review and be briefed on this supplemental material before a Friday cloture vote. So I am filing cloture on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination this evening so the process can move forward, as I indicated earlier this week,” McConnell said. 

So far, no Democrat has said they will support Kavanaugh though Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) remain undecided. Meanwhile, GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) have yet to say how they will vote on Kavanaugh. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) previously said he would support Kavanaugh and absent new information from the FBI’s background investigation into several sexual misconduct allegations is expected to be a yes vote, although Flake may revised his initial contract and claim that the FBI probe was not exhaustive enough.

Republicans would need two of out of the three swing votes to support Kavanaugh if every Democrat opposes him in order to get the 50 votes needed to let Vice President Pence break a tie and confirm him.

Trump’s apparent mocking of Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s first accuser, heightened already elevated tensions around the Senate on Wednesday. Collins called them “plain wrong,” while Murkowski says they were “wholly inappropriate.” Still, republicans appeared confident that absent an 11th hour bombshell spinning out of the FBI’s investigation they would get the votes to confirm Kavanaugh.

“If the report doesn’t come up with anything different than we know now not only will the president continue to support Judge Kavanaugh, but I think he’d have the votes to be confirmed” GOP Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), a member of GOP leadership, told KMOX, a Missouri radio station.

Meanwhile, as reported earlier, Senators had expected to be able to start viewing copies of the FBI report on Wednesday, but Sen. Dick Durbin said that would slip into Thursday and senators would need to share one copy, which would be kept in a secure facility behind closed doors.

McConnell said on Wednesday evening that the chamber will receive the background investigation on Wednesday evening and Judiciary Committee staff will be able to brief members.

“This evening, the Senate will receive the results of the FBI’s supplemental background investigation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. This is now the seventh time the FBI has looked into Judge Kavanaugh’s background. And this information comes on top of what has already been one of the most thorough, most exhaustive Senate reviews of any Supreme Court nominee in our nation’s history,” McConnell said. He added that senators will have the update to the background investigation and the “opportunity to review the investigators’ records.”

The general public will not have access to the report, although it will be only a matter of time before some Senator leaks the full contents of the FBI investigation.

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

One of the most significant themes heading into 2019, is the new US-China Cold War. Recent tit-for-tat exchanges on economic, political and strategic fronts threaten to escalate into a full-blown conflict between both superpowers.

As Washington squeezes Beijing economically through an escalating trade war, it simultaneously uses Freedom of navigation (FON) to sail its warships and or fly its nuclear-capable Boeing B-52 bombers dangerously close to Beijing’s militarized islands in the heavily disputed South China Sea. This high-stakes game of chicken is now spiraling out of control and could lead to a possible military conflict.

Last month, President Trump slapped Beijing with new tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese products, adding to the $50 billion applied on Chinese imports earlier this year, said Asia Times.

Trump also threatened to slap tariffs on another $267 billion of Chinese imports if Beijing failed to address concerns over what his administration views China’s predatory and unfair trade practices.

China responded by applying retaliatory tariffs on $60 billion worth of American imports while suspending trade negotiations with Washington.

Asia Times said China “views its roiled relations with the US as an existential struggle, with the ongoing trade war seen as part of a broader containment strategy Washington is now intensifying through military means in the South China Sea.”

Alibaba founder Jack Ma recently warned that Trump’s trade war with China could lead to military conflict.

“When trade stops, sometimes the war starts. So trade is the way to stop wars,” Ma warned Tuesday during an opening panel discussion at the World Trade Organization Public Forum in Geneva. “Trade is the way to build up trust,” he continued. “Trade is not the weapon to fight against each other.”

“I think China and the U.S. should work together to solve this challenge, create more jobs, cure poverty, use technology to solve disease and the environment—instead of this kind of war,” the billionaire said. “It’s going to destroy not only China-U.S. trade but also lots of other countries and small businesses,” he warned.

On Sunday, a US destroyer conducting FON in the area of the disputed Gaven and Johnson Reefs in the sea’s Spratly chain of islands, encountered a Chinese warship that almost led to a massive accident.

The US Navy criticize China of engaging in an “unsafe and unprofessional maneuver,” as a Chinese warship narrowly missed (by 120 feet) USS Decatur’s bow, which would of caused a devastating collision at sea.

In response, China accused the US Navy of violating its “sovereignty and security” and said the US’ FON deployments of warships near its militarized islands without permission were “seriously damaging” bilateral ties.

We have covered China’s extensive militarization of the South China Sea. Beijing now has fortified islands in the disputed waters where trillions of dollars in trade flow through on a per annum basis.

While Beijing militarizes these disputed waters, Washington is preparing Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea for military conflict.

US Navy Admiral Philip Davidson visited Manila last week and signed a new defense agreement with the Philippines that will increase joint military exercises near the disputed waters.

A scheduled meeting for October between US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chinese General Wei Fengh in Beijing was canceled due to rising tensions.

China also called off a meeting between its naval chief, Vice Admiral Shen Jinlong, and Washington officials in Newport, Rhode Island.

In last week’s UN Security Council meeting, Trump accused Beijing of trying to meddle in US elections.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi denied Trump’s accusations, reiterating that China “will not interfere in any countries’ domestic affairs,” and “refuse[s] to accept any unwarranted accusations against China.”

The tit-for-tat exchanges between US-China on economic, political and strategic fronts increases the probability that a full-blown conflict between the superpowers is on the horizon, likely to start in the South China Sea.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2zQ6z1j Tyler Durden