Month: January 2022

As millions of Chinese brace for another weeks-long lockdown, this time in Xi’an, the analysts over at the Eurasia Group believe that the “failure” of President Xi’s “COVID Zero” policy is one of the biggest policy blunders to look out for in 2022.

As the firm does every year, Eurasia Group on Monday announced its breakdown of the biggest risks for 2022, and coming in at the No. 4 spot is China’s refusal to abandon its “COVID Zero” policies.

For one, China’s inability to contain outbreaks could trigger a supply chain collapse and other global economic disruptions both inside China and abroad.

The Eurasia Group acknowledges that the present view on its “COVID Zero” approach is a major departure from 2020, when China’s zero COVID policy helped it “look incredibly successful in 2020.”

Now, it has become “a fight against a much more transmissible variant with broader lockdowns and vaccines with limited effectiveness.”

While individuals will spend more time in digital spaces this year, both at work and at home, the biggest technology firms are “writing the algorithms that decide what people see and hear, determine their economic and social opportunities and ultimately influence what they think.”

What’s more, China’s population has “virtually no” antibodies protecting it against omicron despite all the jabs and boosters they have received. It’s “exactly the opposite of where President Xi” wants us to to be. Xi wants his country to be in the run-up to his third term, but there’s nothing he can do about it: The initial success of “Zero COVID” and President Xi’s personal attachment to it makes the policy seemingly impossible to change course.

It says that while individuals will spend more time in digital space this year, both at work and at home, the biggest technology firms are “writing the algorithms that decide what people see and hear, determine their economic and social opportunities and ultimately influence what they think.”

Here’s what Eurasia is expecting: China’s policy will fail to contain the pandemic, leading to larger outbreaks, which Beijing will respond to with even more harrowing lockdowns.

We’re already seeing it unfold in Xi’an and Ningbo.

Which city will be the next to face punishing lockdown measures?

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Germany will need natural gas throughout the energy transition to renewable sources, the new German government said this week.

“We will need gas throughout the transitional phase,” government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said.

The government’s plans are to use natural gas as a bridge fuel and gradually wean itself off it by 2045.

Germany has a very strong Green lobby that has now become part of the ruling coalition. Despite an anti-fossil fuel discourse, the Greens have now apparently accepted the necessity of at least one fossil fuel, perhaps not least because Germany has plans to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by the end of this year.

Despite the still raging energy crisis, though alleviated in the past few days by much higher wind power production, Germany shut down three nuclear power plants at the end of 2021, with a total capacity of 4 GW. According to AFP, this capacity is equal to the power generation capacity of 1,000 wind turbines. However, the comparison ends there because nuclear can produce electricity continuously.

This will leave Germany with three nuclear power plants, slated for closure at the end of this year. The anti-nuclear position of the German government earlier this week sent it on a crash course with Brussels, which plans to classify some natural gas and nuclear power projects as green, which would open the door to more investments in these sources of energy alongside wind, solar, and hydrogen.

“We consider nuclear technology to be dangerous,” Steffen Hebestreit told media in Berlin earlier this week, noting the issue of radioactive waste storage.

The spokesman added that Germany “expressly rejects” the EU’s assessment of nuclear energy as sustainable and that Berlin is mulling over the next steps.

The strong anti-nuclear stance of Berlin may well set it on a collision course with neighbor France, which relies on nuclear energy for more than two-thirds of its electricity consumption.

Pope Francis told an audience at the Vatican in Rome on Wednesday that people who substitute pets for children act “selfishly.” The Pope’s comments follow his December warning of a “demographic winter” amid fears the global fertility rate will be halved by the next century. 

“Today … we see a form of selfishness,” Pope Francis told the audience while discussing parenthood. “We see that some people do not want to have a child.

“Sometimes they have one, and that’s it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children.

“This may make people laugh, but it is a reality.”

The practice, said the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, “is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity.”

Thus, “civilization grows old without humanity because we lose the richness of fatherhood and motherhood, and it is the country that suffers,” he concluded.

The pontiff has denounced the “demographic winter” in the past. The latest was back in December. He seems to be well informed about the world’s falling birth rates in the developed world. 

Several jaw-dropping reports over the last few years suggest the planet is experiencing a population crash. Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation warned in 2020 that 23 countries are projected to see their populations halved by 2100. 

While the pontiff has advocated for the world to overcome a demographic winter, there has been a counterforce of global elites trying to cut the population on the planet by half. 

Authored by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times,

From Jan. 11, those who test positive for COVID-19 in England with a lateral flow test (LFD) should not validate the result with a PCR test unless they develop symptoms, UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Wednesday.

It’s expected to ease the pressure on the UK’s PCR testing capacity and shorten the self-isolation period for some.

UKHSA said the temporary suspension is due to the high level of CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus infections across the UK.

An estimated 3.7 million people in the UK had COVID-19 in the week ending Dec. 31, 2021, up from 2.3 million in the week to Dec. 23, and the highest number since comparable figures began in autumn 2020, the Office for National Statistics said.

“Whilst levels of COVID-19 are high, the vast majority of people with positive LFD results can be confident that they have COVID-19,” UKHSA said in a press release.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it’s to ensure the UK’s PCR testing capacity “reaches those who need it most.”

The measure will start one day after 100,000 critical workers in England’s essential services are provided with daily lateral flow tests.

People who test positive for the CCP virus with an LFD but do not develop a new continuous cough, a high temperature, or a loss of, or change in, their normal sense of taste or smell, are told to immediately self-isolate, report the result to the government’s website, and not book a PCR test.

However, those who are eligible for the £500 ($679) Test and Trace Support Payment will still be required to have a confirmatory PCR test result in order to access the fund, and participants of research or surveillance programmes may still be asked to take a PCR test.

Around one million people in England are also expected to receive a PCR test kit by mid-January because they are “at particular risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19” and “have been identified by the NHS as being potentially eligible for new treatments.” But the group is asked to use the kit when they have symptoms to enable prioritised laboratory handling.

Professor John Edmunds, a member of the government’s scientific advisory panel, said the confirmatory PCR test is unnecessary because it “not only wastes time but costs a lot of money and uses up laboratory resources that could be better used elsewhere.”

But he said there were also downsides because PCR tests would give researchers “slightly less information” on the different variants in circulation because the swabs can undergo sequencing to determine which strain of coronavirus is present.

Kate Nicholls, from trade body UKHospitality welcomed the news, saying the measure would shorten self-isolation periods for asymptomatic cases and will help allow the economy to keep moving.

Current law requires people to self-isolate for up to 10 days after receiving a positive PCR test, but many asymptomatic people would have started self-isolation following a positive LFD test as the government advised, effectively lengthening the period.

Scotland and Wales will implement the change from Thursday, five days earlier than England.

The Welsh government estimates it will reduce the demand for PCR tests in Wales by between 5 percent and 15 percent.

Authored by J.Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

Democrats have challenged the legitimacy of every presidential election they’ve lost this millennium: They blamed a corrupt Supreme Court for their defeat in 2000, crooked voting machines in 2004 and Russian interference in 2016 – sparking a years-long collusion hoax to knee-cap Trump’s presidency.

But now, as President Biden’s poll numbers tank, his legislative agenda falters and his party’s 2022 prospects look increasingly grim, they and their media allies are adding a new twist to the tactic: They’re challenging elections before they happen.

Prestigious news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, NPR and the New York Review of Books warn that American democracy is under siege. With headlines ripped straight from Democratic Party talking points they argue that Republicans are planning a two-pronged coup to seize power in 2022 and beyond.

Step one, they say, is a series of election laws being passed by GOP state legislatures designed to thwart the will of the people.

Anyone who has bothered to read these pieces of legislation – which modify but still maintain early voting, mail-in voting, and other open-ballot measures – knows that their impact will be negligible. That hasn’t stopped Biden and others from describing them as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” Note this is the same argument they made for years about voter ID laws, which, studies show, do not suppress minority turnout. Further claims that the laws will allow state legislatures to pick the winners despite the tallies is also a fabrication.

The intent of this argument is clear – to cast doubt on the legitimacy on all Republican victories. That it is being made by the same people who relentlessly (and correctly) assail Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election demonstrates their bad faith.

The second prong of their coup narrative is even more invidious. In their telling, the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was just a test run for Republicans to violently seize power if their plans to rig the elections fail.

Jan. 6 was, indeed, a dark day in American history; it was a criminal riot stoked by a troubled president. Its perpetrators, at every level, deserve the full measure of fair justice.

But it was not insurrection. The perpetrators were unarmed, for one thing. Reuters reports that the FBI found scant evidence that the riot was an organized plot to topple the government. And we can trust the authority of our own eyes to see the absurdity of claims that Jan. 6 was worse than 9/11.

I am tempted to say that no reasonable person could embrace the coup fantasies advanced by the left. And while there is almost certainly a cynical, partisan aspect to these arguments – proponents believe they will help their cause – the truly frightening thing is that many are sincere.

Many honestly believe that the American right is a hotbed of violent hatred bent on gaining control of the nation as the brownshirts did in Germany during the early 1930s. To their mind, Trump is only the outward symbol of a cultural cancer (although NPR compared him to Hitler in a recent report).

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland recently summarized this view in the New Yorker.

“January 6th was not the final act, but perhaps the prologue to a titanic struggle between democracy and violent authoritarianism in America. Long after Donald Trump is gone, we’ll be dealing with a movement of violent, neo-Fascist elements who came very close to knocking over the U.S. government.” 

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Barton Gellman tried to define the threat more precisely in his long Atlantic article, “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” citing a June poll which reported that just over 8% of Americans agreed that Biden’s election “was illegitimate and that violence is justified to restore Trump to the White House.” Never mind that poll results are notoriously unreliable, especially when trying to reduce complex questions to yes, no and maybe answers; this was enough for Gellman and his sources to declare that at least 21 million Americans are “committed insurrections.”

This squishy finding – supported by no evidence of armed groups planning political mayhem – then becomes fact, as Gellman quotes an “expert” who states, “‘The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the KKK in the 1920s.’”

Commentator John Heilemann echoed and expanded this “fact” without challenge on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” telling viewers, “We’ve had political violence before, lynching, many things over the course of time that African Americans have suffered, but this is 30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms.”

Probably because we have never seen signs of such violent intent – even the Jan. 6 assault was arms-free – journalist Ron Brownstein assured CNN voters that the “Let’s Go, Brandon” chant widely adopted by conservatives as code for “F— Joe Biden proves their thirst for “insurrection.”

How can Democrats and their allies embrace such a dark view of the American people? History provides part of the answer.

From their 19th century roots as the party run by Southern planters and Northern political machines, to their embrace of technocratic progressivism during the 20th century, to their current status as the party of global elites, the Democratic Party has long been a hierarchical outfit where those at the top promised to act in the best interests of those below them. Especially in the South, this paternalism was fused with demagoguery, as leaders kept voters in line by playing on fears of the “Negro menace.”

In the years following World War II, Democrats gradually changed the groups they pretended to speak for – working-class whites were out, once marginalized groups were in – but their DNA remained the same. They continued their uneasy relationship with the give-and-take of American democracy; convinced that their policies were unassailable, they argued that moral failings – stupidity, racism and greed – explained why we have two parties (see Thomas Frank’s much-discussed but superficially reasoned 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”). And they began using the exact same language that had once been deployed against blacks to demonize Republicans – today’s warnings of rampant white supremacy and conservative insurrection are updated versions of their ugly rhetoric regarding slave revolts.

In fairness, Republicans have engaged in many of the tactics ascribed to them. But their historic embrace of limited governmental power has usually restrained their impulse to direct people’s lives.

They have tended to demonize small groups (e.g. left-wing communists) rather than entire populations. The argument that Republicans hate African Americans is simply a Democrat falsehood belied by the GOP’s long support for racial justice and the fact that America is by every measure less racist than it has ever been.

America is a fractured nation and we must be clear-eyed about the sources of this division. But instead of providing insight, the ugly smears passing as wisdom among Democrats are only adding fuel to the fire. In their quest for power, they seem willing to burn down the entire house.

Beijing has once again devised a way to protect Chinese children from the deleterious effects of technology like TikTok: China’s Cyberspace Administration will start closely regulating algorithms like the TikTok content recommendation algorithm start.

A draft of the rules was released back in August. But according to the final version released Tuesday, the rules forbid practices that encourage addiction or high consumption as well as any activities that endanger national security.

According to the Internet Information Service Algorithm Recommendation Management Regulations: “In recent years, algorithm applications have injected new momentum into political, economic, and social development. At the same time, problems caused by algorithm discrimination, ‘big data killing,’ and inducing indulgence in the unreasonable application of algorithms have also profoundly affected the normal communication order and market order.”

Algorithms like the TikTok algorithm creates problems like social order poses challenges to safeguarding ideological security, social fairness and justice, and the legitimate rights and interests of netizens. The introduction of targeted algorithm recommendation rules and regulations in the field of Internet information services is a need to prevent and resolve security risks, and it is also a need to promote the healthy development of algorithm recommendation services and improve the level of supervision capabilities.

The decision to crack down on social media companies that harvest user data in this way comes as Beijing struggles to protect user data. Chinese tech companies use algorithm technology for a wide range of applications, from recommending content to users on e-commerce and short video platforms to offering efficient food delivery services. However, companies seeking better profits have been accused of using highly manipulative algorithms to grab user attention, influence prices, and even exploit the rights of gig workers.

The new policy requires companies that use these types of algorithms to publicly disclose how their recommendation algorithms work, and allow users to easily turn off the service.

The new rules also help protect the Chinese public from “fake news” that might be disseminated via platforms like TikTok.

Read the full statement from the Cyberspace Administration of China below (translation courtesy of Google):

Recently, the State Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued the “Internet Information Service Algorithm Recommendation Management Regulations” (hereinafter referred to as the “Regulations”), which will come into force on March 1, 2022. The relevant person in charge of the National Internet Information Office stated that the “Regulations” were issued to standardize Internet information service algorithm recommendation activities, safeguard national security and social public interests, protect the legitimate rights and interests of citizens, legal persons and other organizations, and promote the healthy development of Internet information services.

In recent years, algorithm applications have injected new momentum into political, economic, and social development. At the same time, problems caused by algorithm discrimination, “big data killing”, and inducing indulge in the unreasonable application of algorithms have also profoundly affected the normal communication order and market order. And social order poses challenges to safeguarding ideological security, social fairness and justice, and the legitimate rights and interests of netizens. The introduction of targeted algorithm recommendation rules and regulations in the field of Internet information services is a need to prevent and resolve security risks, and it is also a need to promote the healthy development of algorithm recommendation services and improve the level of supervision capabilities.

The “Regulations” clarify that the application of algorithmic recommendation technology refers to the use of algorithmic technologies such as generating synthesis, personalized push, sorting and selection, retrieval and filtering, and scheduling and decision-making to provide users with information. The national cybersecurity and informatization department is responsible for overall planning and coordination of the national algorithm recommendation service governance and related supervision and management. The State Council’s telecommunications, public security, market supervision and other relevant departments are responsible for the supervision and management of algorithm recommendation services in accordance with their respective responsibilities. The local cybersecurity and informatization department is responsible for overall planning and coordination of algorithm recommendation service governance and related supervision and management within the administrative area. Relevant local departments are responsible for the supervision and management of algorithm recommendation services in their respective administrative regions according to their respective responsibilities.

The “Regulations” clarify the information service specifications of algorithm recommendation service providers, requiring algorithm recommendation service providers to adhere to the mainstream value orientation, actively spread positive energy, and must not use algorithm recommendation services to engage in illegal activities or disseminate illegal information. Measures should be taken to prevent and Resist the dissemination of bad information; establish and improve management systems and technical measures such as user registration, information release review, data security and personal information protection, and emergency response to security incidents, and regularly review, evaluate, and verify algorithm mechanisms, models, data, and application results; Establish and improve the feature database for identifying illegal and bad information. If illegal or bad information is found, corresponding measures should be taken; strengthen the management of user models and user tags, and improve the rules for points of interest and user tags recorded in the user model; Strengthen the ecological management of the algorithm recommendation service page, establish and improve the mechanism of manual intervention and user independent selection, and actively present information that meets the mainstream value orientation in key links; standardize the development of Internet news information services, and shall not generate synthetic false news information or disseminate non-state regulations News information released by the units within; algorithms shall not be used to influence online public opinion, circumvent supervision and management, monopoly and unfair competition.

The “Regulations” clarify the user rights protection requirements of algorithm recommendation service providers, including guaranteeing the right to know the algorithm, requiring users to be informed of the provision of algorithm recommendation services, and publicizing the basic principles, purpose and intentions and main operating mechanisms of the service; guaranteeing the algorithm The right to choose should provide users with options that are not specific to their personal characteristics, or the option to conveniently turn off algorithm recommendation services. In addition, the “Regulations” clarify specific requirements for the provision of algorithmic recommendation services to minors, the elderly, workers, consumers and other subjects. If algorithmic recommendation services are not used to induce minors to indulge in the Internet, it should be convenient for the safety of the elderly. The use of algorithmic recommendation services shall establish and improve the relevant algorithms of platform order distribution, remuneration composition and payment, working hours, rewards and punishments, and shall not use algorithms to implement unreasonable trading conditions such as transaction prices based on consumer preferences and transaction habits. Differential treatment, etc.

The “Regulations” require that algorithm recommendation service providers with public opinion attributes or social mobilization capabilities should fill in the filing information through the Internet information service algorithm filing system within ten working days from the date of providing the service, and perform the filing procedures; if the filing information has changed , The change procedures should be completed within the specified time. Algorithm recommendation service providers shall keep network logs in accordance with the law, cooperate with relevant departments to carry out safety assessment and supervision and inspection work, and provide necessary technical and data support and assistance.

The relevant person in charge of the National Internet Information Office pointed out that the governance of algorithm recommendation services requires the participation of the government, enterprises, society, and netizens to promote fairness, fairness, standardization and transparency of algorithm recommendation services, promote the improvement of algorithm recommendation services, and create a clearer network space.