Chinese drone-maker DJI has denied multiple allegations it has aided Russia's military during the illegal invasion of Ukraine – an extraordinary claim, as the firm has previously come to the attention of US authorities for leaking data and aiding human rights abuses. DJI's involvement in Russia's illegal invasion first became an issue around March 11, when allegations emerged that Ukrainian users were unable to use a DJI drone detection product called DJI AeroScope that the Chinese company bills as "a comprehensive drone detection platform that rapidly identifies UAV communication links, gathering information such as flight status, paths, and other information in real time."
Russian users could run AeroScope, leading to accusations that DJI was assisting Moscow. DJI is already a pariah in the US, which has included it on the Entity List forbidden to access US tech, and banned the US military from using its products. The USA has even forbidden investment in the drone-maker on grounds it is effectively an arm of China's military and has actively assisted surveillance and repression of the Muslim Uyghur minority in China's Xinjiang province. China and Russia recently struck a renewed friendship both nations said was "without limits". While China has not actively supported Russia's illegal invasion, the prospect of a Chinese company effectively taking sides by denying Ukraine access represents a highly controversial turn of events. DJI hosed down the allegation, stating it was "working with customers to resolve some AeroScope malfunctions in Ukraine that we suspect are related to interim loss of power and/or internet services." But the issue didn't go away. Two days after that denial, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister for digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov made a similar allegation – claiming Russia has access to an enhanced version of AeroScope that has a range of 50km. Fedorov asked for Ukraine to be offered access to the same long-range service, and for all DJI products operating but not acquired within Ukraine to be grounded, to reduce Moscow's ability to use its drones. DJI responded with a tweet pointing out that all of its products broadcast info that can be consumed by AeroScope, and that geofencing use of its products in Ukraine was impractical. Geofencing may also have been unwelcome, as Ukraine has regularly released footage captured by drones to illustrate its self-defense efforts. Allegations that DJI was aiding Russia persisted and on March 26 a new claim emerged: that DJI was sharing GPS coordinates of drones operated by Ukraine's defense forces with Russia. DJI again denied the allegation. But the accusation name-checked retailers that sell DJI products and called on them to remove the drones from their shelves. One retailer – Germany's Media Markt – stopped sales of the drone-maker's products. DJI fought back with a press release that refutes the latest claim and labels efforts to have retailers drop its products "a coordinated campaign making false allegations against DJI via thousands of spam messages containing the same content." The Chinese company maintains it's just a humble company trying to offer users an elevated view of the world. Yet the US clearly has a different view of DJI. And now, rightly or wrongly, so do many more people around the world.
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The United States has all but declared the COVID-19 pandemic over and done with. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advised 230 million Americans, 70 percent of the population, to no longer wear masks in most cases, including indoors. Cities, counties, and states across the US have lifted their mask mandates. Restaurants, shopping malls, movie theatres, and grocery stores have dropped mask and physical distancing requirements. Even school districts have gone mask-optional since the end of February. This is despite more than 55,000 Americans contracting the disease and nearly 2,000 dying from it and the complications it causes every day through early March.
As the US approaches one million dead from COVID and 80 million sickened from this pathogen and its variants, it is clear that whiteness, capitalism, and narcissism have prolonged the pandemic, and horribly so. Two years ago, I predicted that the US as a “failing state” would do the bare minimum to protect ordinary people, and would sell the idea that despite the evidence, Americans can lead “normal lives” in the middle of a pandemic. “America’s lack of leadership at home and abroad during this pandemic has been stunning. But its populace’s denial of these facts is simply gobsmacking,” I wrote in April 2020. Two years later, this continued lack of leadership is America’s dystopian normal. Forget about federal-level mandates to mask up and to jab up on vaccines. Forget about continued support for families living with poverty and unemployment in the middle of yo-yo openings and closings with each surge of COVID-19. And forget about easing the pain of healthcare debt, student loan debt, and rental debt millions have accumulated during the past two-plus years. The business of the US is always in support of corporations and profit first. That is why President Joe Biden – and President Donald Trump before him – never declared the pandemic a national security threat or federalised the public health crisis COVID-19 undoubtedly became. They both have been too beholden to corporations to take this step. The result has been 25 months of “me first” responses to the pandemic. There have been endless protests against local and state-level mask mandates and endless videos of white Americans violating such mandates. Nearly 80 million Americans have yet to get a single vaccine jab – including my own mother – because they “don’t know what’s in this stuff”. Despite the obvious need for community collaboration to protect everyone from COVID-19 death and its long-haul complications, the fundamental belief in individualism is stronger than ever. If American individualism in this pandemic isn’t prime evidence of the US as a narcissistic nation, then nothing is. What’s worse is this narcissism is killing people, especially white Americans, and needlessly so. All because they believed the media reports of highly disproportionate COVID-19 sickness and death among Black and Brown Americans in early 2020. As the author Johnathan Metzl wrote in his Dying of Whiteness, “When politics demands that people resist available health care,” among other spiteful decisions, “these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness.” When combined with narcissism, white Americans, in particular, have acted in privileged ways towards the pandemic, ways that have killed tens of thousands and have sickened millions in the process. Pfizer and Moderna and other Big Pharma companies in the US and in Europe have refused to freely share their vaccine recipes with the rest of the world. But sure, let Americans complain about new variants when the US, the European Union, and the United Nations’s WHO have not done nearly enough to inoculate the world against the virus and its future possible variants. Biden asked everyone watching his recent State of the Union address to celebrate how the US, out of its own goodness, had “sent 475 million vaccine doses to 112 countries, more than any other nation” during the previous year. Keep in mind, the world’s human population is at 7.9 billion. We would need between 16 and 24 billion jabs to inoculate the entire world against COVID-19 and its variants as of today – current figures show about 10 billion jabs worldwide, mostly in the world’s richest nations. Another statement of hubris and needless navel-gazing. The US is barely two months removed from the height of the Omicron surge, when a million people contracted the variant in just one day. Yet President Biden, through his State of the Union speech, declared a return to the pre-pandemic normal. “It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again,” Biden said. “Our schools are open. Let’s keep it that way. Our kids need to be in school,” he said. Despite his comment, “we will never just accept living with COVID-19,” Biden and the rest of the US have completely contradicted this sentiment. It completely reflects the US as a whole, where there was never a full, nationwide shutdown of activities with federal mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. It is a near-total capitulation to the wealthy and corporate, who have kept their fingers crossed that a vaccines-or-bust strategy would effectively end COVID-19 in the US. It is a ho-hum response to what the US has always been: A country of greedy capitalists who want a return to the racist, ableist, and narcissistic conditions that made the COVID-19 pandemic possible in the first place. They won’t even give us time to mourn our losses. The past 29 months of COVID worldwide are a reflection of profit over people, and rich and white people over everyone else. The past 25 months of COVID-19 in the US indicate exactly the same, except minus the shock and massive protests of people expecting better from their government. Instead, the racism of whiteness and narcissism and capitalism will subject more in the US and worldwide to needless death and disability, and continue to turn the US into a failing nation-state. It makes the early predictions of only “240,000 dead” by the start of 2022 an absurd lie, a macabre and laughable shame. It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like. Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.
International human rights groups have sounded the alarm. After the March 8 attacks, Amnesty International warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.” To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug. The anti-democratic ideology these groups espouse runs counter the values of the Euromaidan. Ukrainians took to the streets to confront former President Yanukovych because they wanted to live in a democratic state where everyone is held accountable. Honoring the values of Euromaidan therefore requires Kyiv to protect all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, or political views. Far-right impunity also represents a dangerous threat to Ukraine’s statehood. It’s been long understood in Western political and legal philosophy that the state must have a monopoly on violence in order to be a legitimate state, and when a state loses this monopoly, society starts to break down. Ukraine’s certainly nowhere near this point, but it shouldn’t take any chances either. Kyiv should understand that turning a blind eye toward all of this activity risks damaging Ukraine’s international reputation. The Kremlin won’t hesitate to cynically use the far right’s activities to push its false claim that Ukraine is a hornet’s nest of fascists, while Kyiv could also lose support in the West for its inaction. Luckily, the authorities still have time to nip things in the bud if they act now. President Petro Poroshenko could start by enacting a “zero-tolerance” policy on unsanctioned vigilantism and direct authorities to cleanse law enforcement agencies of far-right sympathizers such as Sergei Korotkykh, who heads the National Police’s head of security for sites of strategic importance. Government agencies at all levels should also stop cooperating with far-right groups. In addition to the Youth Ministry’s problematic funding, C14 and a Kyiv city district recently signed an agreement allowing C14 to establish a “municipal guard” to patrol the streets; three such militia-run guard forces are already registered in Kyiv, and twenty-one operate in other cities as well. And C14’s dangerous leader Yevhen Karas even boasts openly about cooperating with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU). All this needs to end and state officials found to be cooperating with extremists must be removed. Finally, it’s important that Poroshenko and other senior government officials publicly condemn extreme organizations like C14 and speak out in support of marginalized groups. As three straight years of incident-free Kyiv Pride events demonstrate, the state certainly possesses the capability to deter far-right vigilantism if it wants to. However, the authorities are clearly aware of Kyiv Pride’s international visibility and the real test will come once the bright lights disappear. It won’t be easy to end far-right impunity, but the government must summon the will to do so now. But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).
Normally all one need do is recast the dominant narrative of events in such a way as to allow the system to reestablish compliance by enough links in the informational control chains to inspire physical action in meat space – or at least just distract the public until the problem goes away. The problem is that none of this has worked to move the trucks. The Virtual class can’t move the trucks. Smears alone can’t move trucks. All the towing companies in Ottawa have refused to move the trucks. Because, surprisingly, it turns out tow truck drivers also drive trucks for a living. There aren’t enough police to seize the trucks, because the rank and file police in Ottawa have been taking all of their vacation and sick days, mysteriously not showing up for work, or simply resigning. It turns out that police officers tend to also be part of the Physical class, and class solidarity may actually be a thing. But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.
In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet. But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world. The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem. When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking brakes (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world. To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways. The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.
The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it. Like many, I have spent the last couple of weeks a bit entranced by the trucker protests happening in Canada (and now around the world, from Paris to Wellington). I initially tried to document here every twist and turn of the Freedom Convoy drama, but found it nearly impossible. Events continue to unfold very quickly. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just invoked the Emergencies Act (i.e. martial law), allowing him to suspend civil liberties and basically do whatever he wants (more on that later) to crush the protests. So they may soon be quelled. Or perhaps not. No one can yet say precisely how all this may end.
But in any case news and commentary detailing the protests can now be found everywhere, so I’m just going to assume you already have a familiarity with what’s happening, as I want to try to distill a few more unique thoughts on why I find these protests so striking. Specifically, why all this seems like such a perfect reflection of the Reality War. In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.” In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.” I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here: The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labour is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself. So let’s consider this using the protests as a lens, and vice versa. “Progressive” ideology always rests on a conviction that the current “regressive” system is comprehensively unjust and must be destroyed by exploiting its weaknesses. The most famous proponent of such tactics in recent years has been the late Saul Alinksy, the intellectual godfather of the modern Democrat Party, but former Soviet journalist and KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov laid out an even more concise strategy for subversion in a 1984 interview. Alinksy’s seminal book specified 13 Rules for Radicals, but Bezmenov had only four “stages of ideological subversion,” and they will sound very familiar to anyone following the current wave of left-wing riots, or the politicized final stages of the coronavirus panic before it: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Normalization. Bezmenov defined ideological subversion, or “active measures” as the KGB preferred to call it, as a “slow brainwashing process” to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite their abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”
Stage 1: Demoralization Bezmenov said the first stage, Demoralization, could take 15 to 20 years to complete because “this is the minimum number of years it takes to educate one generation of students.” “Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism,” he warned in 1984, judging that the demoralization process had been “basically completed” by that point. “Actually, it’s over-fulfilled, because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously, not even Comrade Andropov and all of his experts would even dream of such tremendous success,” he added, referring to former KGB head and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. “Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to a lack of moral standards.” Bezmenov explained that demoralization is important because it robs the targeted population of its ability to process valid information. Even when demoralization targets are “showered with authentic proof” of contrary positions, they simply “refuse to believe it.” Demoralization is quite obvious among today’s young people, whose faith in their country has been systematically destroyed throughout their lives by the education and media establishment. To take a recent high-profile example, the New York Times’ fraudulent “1619 Project” argued that “American history” actually began with the arrival of black slaves in North America and the Revolutionary War was fought by the colonists to preserve slavery. Although comprehensively debunked by actual historians, and even the original author has admitted her core thesis was not true, the 1619 Project is now part of some school curricula. Another word for demoralization is guilt. Americans are routinely compelled to feel guilty about their society and national history. Guilt is the most powerful force in left-wing politics and academia. People will not accept the radical expansion of punitive government power unless they feel guilty and deserving of punishment. Stage 2: Destabilization The second stage, Destabilization, is much faster, requiring only two to five years under KGB doctrine. In this stage, the fundamentals of the targeted population’s economy, political system, and culture would be attacked, while the demoralized population could not mount much of a defence. Bezmenov in 1984 found it “absolutely fantastic” how much influence Marxist-Leninist ideas had developed in the American economy and military. In essence, a demoralized population becomes willing to believe the worst criticisms of its own society, while learning to see defenders of that society as their enemies, while avowed enemies become natural allies. The defenders are held to strict standards, while anything goes for the most strident critics. Whatever Bezmenov saw in the destabilized American society of the early 1980s with respect to the Soviet Union, it’s easy to see how the American Left has destabilized entire segments of modern society after demoralizing them. They see enemies everywhere, while no pro-American authority can be trusted. It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of demoralization followed by destabilization than hordes of anti-capitalist activists texting each other on their iPhones. Not coincidentally, hostile foreign powers like Communist China and Iran are reaching out to destabilized American communities and offering themselves as guides and allies. Their sales pitches aren’t exactly smooth, but they definitely are making an effort. A destabilized population becomes obsessed with hypocrisy as the ultimate political sin. They believe the best ideas – individual liberty, sovereign rights, capitalism, even the rule of law – are presented insincerely by sinister powers who seek to exploit and manipulate them. The precious resource of goodwill disappears from society as everyone comes to believe their neighbors hate them and cannot be trusted. Demoralized people lose faith in their nation, history, and ideals; destabilized people lose faith in each other. Stage 3: Crisis Once a society has been destabilized, Bezmenov said the time would be ripe to create a Crisis, which he estimated would take six to eight weeks in the Eighties. With turbo Internet speed, the modern era can punch out a crisis much faster than that. A crisis has the obvious benefit of panicking demoralized, destabilized people into abandoning their legal protections and constitutional ideals. During the coronavirus panic, people who brought up those ideals were treated like lunatics. The pendulum swung the other way with blinding speed during the riots. In the span of one week, the right to peaceable assembly went from a crazed defiance of common-sense lockdown rules to an urgent matter that utterly transcended the deadly pandemic. Suddenly, angry political demonstration magically cured the coronavirus, or made the projected wave of sickness and death into a purely secondary concern. If you wanted to work at the store so you could feed your family in late March, you were selfishly trying to “kill my Grandma to pad your bank account.” If you wanted to burn the store down in early June to protest white supremacy, nobody mentioned their imperiled grandmothers. The more subtle benefit of a crisis is that it tends to de-legitimize aspects of the existing system that have already been softened up by the long process of demoralization and destabilization. Those who control the organs of public communication have the power to decide which aspects of the system are supposedly indicted by the crisis. For example, the dominant media Left will go to great lengths to avoid painting the coronavirus as an indictment of the flabby, blinkered, bureaucratic Big Government that grew over the past few decades, and it will not discuss the failures of left-wing mayors and governors. On the contrary, the pandemic was used to attack the competence of Republican governors who turned out to be entirely correct in their actions, as in Florida and Georgia. During the riots, the media is completely uninterested in discussing the incompetence of left-wing officials who allowed violence to rage out of control with deadly consequences. Somehow the lesson of wanton violence that killed people and destroyed countless livelihoods became “let’s get rid of the police altogether.” The threat of a crisis is essential for terrorizing the middle class into accepting a political agenda that is actively hostile to its interests, which leads to the fourth stage of subversion: the offer to make the pain and fear go away by accepting political domination. Stage 4: Normalization “After a crisis, with a violent change of the power structure and economy, you have a so-called period of Normalization that may last indefinitely,” Bezmenov said, arriving at the fourth stage of subversion. “Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda,” he explained. Interestingly, it also happens to be the core theme of the 2020 Democrat presidential campaign. “When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is ‘normalized.’ This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kinds of goodies and a paradise on Earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free-market competition, and to put a Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale, who will promise lots of things – never mind whether the promises are fulfillable or not,” Bezmenov cautioned. As things turned out, Walter Mondale never got his chance to be a benevolent dictator, and to some extent Bezmenov’s four-step model of subversion could be applied to almost any political campaign. They almost all begin with telling voters things are awful, crises have erupted, and normality can be restored only by voting for the challenger (or preserved only by voting for the incumbent). Bezmenov, however, was insistent that American left-wing professors and civil-rights leaders were deliberately running Andropov’s strategy with a conscious effort to achieve destabilization, the step that truly distinguishes ideological subversion from the usual promises to put a chicken in every pot. “They are instrumental in the process of subversion only to destabilize a nation,” he said of the academics and activists. “When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power, obviously they get offended. They think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.” The American version of this process probably would not end with the mass execution of inconvenient intellectuals, but there is a parallel in what would happen to the intellectual supporters of the current riots if the Democrats win in 2020. They would discover that the victorious Democrat Party is not at all interested in their systemic criticisms of public union employees, such as police officers. Many bones would be thrown to activist groups to purchase their loyalty – and, much more importantly, the loyalty of their leaders – but not the one concession they ostensibly care about the most: a system that makes it easier to discipline and fire government employees. This metaphorical lining up and shooting of intellectuals is already happening with Lockdown Forever enthusiasts, who only a few days ago were hammering out passionate arguments that American businesses must remain shuttered for weeks or months to come, and anyone who dared to question their dire warnings was a selfish monster willing to kill other people’s grandmothers to pad out their 401k accounts. In the blink of an eye, Lockdown Forever went from the vital engineers of a politically useful crisis to inconvenient obstacles for the new crisis, nationwide riots. Most of the lockdown gurus sensed this shift in the political winds and quickly trimmed their sails, hammering out new screeds that claimed protesters are probably immune to the coronavirus somehow, or even more incredibly, that another outbreak would be a small price to pay for righteous political activism: These are the same medical activists who were shrieking in March that the coronavirus could kill millions of Americans if lockdowns were not imposed immediately, and just a few weeks ago, left-wingers were obsessed with calculations that showed COVID-19 is exceptionally deadly to the black community. But suddenly the risk of millions of deaths, 70 percent of them purportedly likely to be black Americans, means nothing compared to the vital urgency of protesting against “white supremacy.”
Who is Cai?
Cai Niangniang is a pseudonym for the model, who is 28 years-old and from Leshan in the western province of Sichuan. And in her weibo statement, she said she did not deserve to be cyber-bullied because of her appearance. “My looks were given to me by my parents,” she wrote. “I’m just an ordinary worker doing my job.” Netizens had attacked her for days, with some accusing her of being “unpatriotic” and “uglifying Chinese people”. Such was the public interest that Three Squirrels removed the ads online and apologised, saying the model’s makeup had been chosen to suit her features, not to make her appear in a certain way. “Regarding the opinion that the model does not fit the mainstream’s aesthetic taste and makes the public feel uncomfortable, we are sincerely sorry,” the company pleaded. What’s the problem? Angry Chinese netizens users have recently accused several – mostly Western – companies of promoting racist stereotypes through their ads. Prominent fashion photographer Chen Man was forced to apologise for her “ignorance” in November amid a similar controversy over an ad for the French luxury brand, Dior, that featured another ‘narrow-eyed’ model. Mercedes-Benz and Gucci have also been targeted for similar situations. State media has often weighed in too – as did the China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, in an opinion piece on the Cai Niang Niang saga in late December. “As a domestic brand, Three Squirrels should have known about the sensitivity of Chinese consumers to how they are portrayed in advertisements,” it said. “For too long, Western criteria for beauty, and Western likes and dislikes have dominated aesthetics.” Many netizens have argued that ad campaigns should feature models with rounder eyes and fairer skin – more typical ideals of beauty in China. Others, however, expressed an alternative view: that such ‘ideals’ are themselves Western imports and that narrower eyes should be considered equally beautiful. One of China’s largest and most pervasive surveillance networks got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai. In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing tens of thousands of security cameras across urban and rural areas — more than 28,500 in total by 2016. Even the smallest villages had at least six security cameras installed, according to state media.
Those cameras weren’t just monitored by police and automated facial recognition algorithms. Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything amiss. The security footage could also be viewed on smartphones. In 2015 the Chinese government announced that a similar program would be rolled out across China, with a particular focus on remote and rural towns. It was called the “Xueliang Project,” or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a quote from communist China’s former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong who once wrote that “the people have sharp eyes” when looking out for neighbors not living up to communist values. Sharp Eyes is one of a number of overlapping and intersecting technological surveillance projects built by the Chinese government over the last two decades. Projects like the Golden Shield Project, Safe Cities, SkyNet, Smart Cities, and now Sharp Eyes mean that there are more than 200 million public and private security cameras installed across China. Every five years, the Chinese government releases a plan outlining what it looks to achieve in the next half-decade. China’s 2016 five-year plan set a goal for Sharp Eyes to achieve 100% coverage of China’s public spaces in 2020. Though publicly available reports don’t indicate whether the program has hit that goal — they suggest that the country has gotten very close. China’s modern surveillance scheme started in 2003, according to Dahlia Peterson, research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, with the creation of the Golden Shield Project. The Golden Shield Project, run by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), is, in part, responsible for the country’s strict internet censorship. But the program also included physical surveillance. The MPS created databases that included 96% of China’s citizens, with one titled the National Basic Population Information Database. That database includes household registration information, called “hukou,” as well as information on past travels and criminal history, according to a report from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. Local population databases were also created, according to a paper published in the American Journal of Political Science. These local databases allowed for blacklists, which barred the use of public transportation. Police would be dispatched if someone who had been blacklisted tried to book a bus, train, or airline ticket. Following Golden Shield, China launched two other surveillance projects focused on the installation of cameras. Safe Cities, launched in 2003, focused on disaster warnings, traffic management, and public security. SkyNet focused on installing cameras connected to facial recognition algorithms. “Chinese state-run media has claimed Skynet can scan the entire Chinese population in one second with 99.8 percent accuracy, yet such claims ignore glaring technical limitations,” Peterson wrote. Observers should take these figures with a grain of salt: Accurate and up-to-date information about China’s surveillance initiatives isn’t easily available, and what is publicly known is mainly generated by academics and journalists with some access to government officials or surveillance equipment manufacturers. It’s also unclear which cameras are exclusively viewed by village, city, and provincial governments, and which feed data back to the central government. Just like Golden Shield, the SkyNet program still exists today, and benefits from 16 years of A.I. research, as well as the tech industry’s boom. According to the New York Times, SkyNet data is used at building complexes that use facial recognition to open security gates. The photos from those security gates are then shared with local police to build a database of the local population. One of the most potentially far-reaching trends in the financial landscape right now is the imminent roll-out of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and the parallel attacks which central bankers are waging on private digital currencies and tokens as they tee up the launch of their CBDCs. First some clarifications. While the majority of central bank issued currencies (fiat currencies) in existence around the world are already in digital form, a fiat currency held in digital form is not the same as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). What is a CBDC? A CBDC generally refers to electronic or virtual central bank (fiat) money that is created in the form of digital tokens or account balances which are digital claims on the central bank. CBDCs will be issued by central banks and will be legal tender. Many CBDCs that are being researched and developed employ Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), with the recording of transactions on a blockchain. However unlike private cryptocurrencies which use a permissionless and open design, CBDCs that use DLT will use permissioned variants (deciding who has access to the network and who can view and update records in the ledger). Critically, as the name suggests, CBDCs will be centralized and governed by the issuing authority (i.e. a central bank). So, in their design and structure, CBDCs can be viewed as the very antithesis to decentralized private cryptocurrencies and tokens. Central banks have already working on two types of CBDCs, ‘wholesale’ digital tokens that would have access restricted to banks and financial entities to be used for activities like interbank payments and wholesale market transactions, and ‘general purpose’ (retail) CBDC for the general public to be used in retail transactions. It is this ‘general purpose’ CBDC which most people are referring to when they discuss central bank digital currencies, and it is these ‘general purpose’ CBDCs that will be most important to watch when central banks and governments begin to attempt their roll-outs to distribute CBDCs to billions of people across the world either through account-based CBDCs or ‘digital cash’ tokens. As you can guess, account-based CBDCs will be tied to user identities and Digital IDs, and straight off the bat they allow for total surveillance by the State and torpedo any chance of anonymity. For this reason, they are already a favourite among central banks. Given that CBDCs will be centralized ledgers and can be programmable, the ‘digital cash’ token option is not much better in terms of privacy and freedom. Many central banks will probably opt for a hybrid model of both account-based and token based digital cash. As an example, Canada, the one time liberal democracy, perhaps illustrates the account-based vs token based choices best, where Canada’s central bank, the Bank of Canada, in it’s design documentation for CBDCs shows that at the end of the day, it’s about surveillance and control, saying that : “anonymous token-based options would be allowable for smaller payments, while account-based access would be required for larger purchases.” Accelerating rollout
CBDCs are not just a buzzword or a hazy innovation that may appear sometime in the distant future. They are actively being developed now, and in widespread fashion. In January 2020, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issued the result of a survey on CBDC's that it had conducted in the second half of 2019, and to which 66 central banks had responded. Strikingly, 10% of central bank respondents (which represented a fifth of the world’s population) said that they were likely to issue a ‘general purpose’ CBDC (for the general public) in the near future (within the next 3 years). Another 20% of central bank respondents said they would likely issue a ‘general purpose’ CBDC in the medium term (within 6 years). In August 2020, the BIS published a comprehensive working paper on CBDCs titled “Rise the central bank digital currencies drivers, approaches and technologies" one part of which analysed the BIS database of central banker speeches and found that between December 2013 and May 2020, there had been 138 central banker speeches mentioning CBDCs, with a dramatic increase in CBDC related speeches since 2016, a timeframe which coincided with central banks launching research projects on CBDCs. The same BIS report also highlighted that, (totally coincidentally) the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ “accelerated work on CBDCs in some jurisdictions." Linda Kim SINGAPORE, September 20 -- The High Court on Friday ruled that a married couple, who are now in prison for abusing their Myanmar maid, will start serving their jail term for abusing their Indonesian maid only after completing their current sentence. This means former regional IT manager Tay Wee Kiat will serve a total jail term of six years and one month for abusing both maids. His wife, former senior sales manager Chia Yun Ling, 43, will serve a total term of four years and one month. Tay and Chia had been given two sets of sentences, arising out of two separate trials and appeals. The commencement date for the first set of sentences had been put on hold pending the conclusion of the second set of proceedings. On Friday, a panel of three judges agreed with prosecutors that the two sets of sentences should run one after the other. "We do not see any valid reason for the sentences to commence on an earlier date as that would virtually enable the accused persons to evade punishment entirely for one set of offences," said Justice See Kee Oon. In lieu of paying compensation of $17,850 to the two maids, Tay will have to serve another six weeks, while Chia will have to serve an additional five weeks and 10 days. The court, which also comprised Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and Judge of Appeal Tay Yong Kwang, declined a request by the prosecution for examination and seizure of the couple's assets as a consequence of not paying compensation. The court noted that the prosecution had elected to seek default jail terms, among other mechanisms prescribed by law. "If the prosecution had wanted to seek orders for examination and garnishment, the necessary directions ought to have been sought at the last hearing before us." Tay and Chia had abused their maids in mostly separate incidents over a period of almost two years. The exception was an incident in which Tay kicked the two maids after making them get into a push-up position. He also ordered the two maids to slap each other 10 times, and forced them to bow and get up in front of a Buddhist altar 100 times, even though one was a Muslim and the other a Christian. Tay had forced Ms Fitriyah, an Indonesian who goes by one name, to stand on one leg on a stool while holding another stool above her head, with a bottle shoved into her mouth. Chia had force-fed Ms Moe Moe Than a mixture of rice and sugar through a funnel. When the Myanmar maid threw up as a result, Chia scolded her and told her to eat her own vomit. The couple were first convicted and sentenced in 2017 for abusing Ms Fitriyah. In March last year, following the prosecution's appeal, Tay's jail term for abusing Ms Fitriyah was increased from 28 months to 43 months. Chia's jail term remained at two months. In March this year, the couple were convicted and sentenced for abusing Ms Moe Moe Than. They started serving their sentences for this set of charges on March 27. In August, Tay's jail term for abusing Ms Moe Moe Than was increased from 24 months to 30 months after an appeal by the prosecution. There was no change to Chia's jail term of 47 months. On Friday, Deputy Public Prosecutor Tan Wen Hsien argued the two sets of sentences should run consecutively to each other. Consecutive sentences would reflect the couple's total criminality, the DPP argued, noting that there were multiple charges for unrelated offences against two different victims. Linda Kim HONG KONG, September 4 -- Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam on Wednesday formally withdrew a contentious extradition Bill following months of protests. "The government will formally withdraw the Bill in order to fully allay public concerns," she said in a pre-recorded address in Cantonese and English that was carried by all major broadcasters in Hong Kong. Mrs Lam said a motion to withdraw with be tabled when the Legislative Council reconvenes. Although Mrs Lam had previously suspended the Bill – saying it was “dead” – her move did little to appease demonstrators, who continued protesting and expanded their demands to include calls for greater democratic freedom. Without the Bill’s formal withdrawal, it could be reintroduced in a matter of days. This essentially responds to one of five demands protesters have asked for. The others are: the retraction of the word “riot” to describe rallies; the release of all arrested demonstrators; an independent inquiry into the police; and the right for Hong Kong people to democratically choose their own leaders. While she ruled out setting up an independent commission to look into the events that have led to recent mass protests, she said that the Independent Police Complaints Commission will be reinforced by former director of education Helen Yu and senior lawyer Paul Lam. The government will also meet with various stakeholders and members of the public in a bid to address the various social issues she said. "After more than two months of social unrest, it's obvious to many that the discontentment extends far beyond the (extradition) Bill," Mrs Lam added. The announcement follows a meeting with pro-establishment political figures, the South China Morning Post newspaper and other media reported, citing people they did not identify. The gathering included local legislators and the city's representatives to national legislative bodies. The meeting follows a weekend of demonstrations that saw some of the fiercest clashes between protesters and riot police. Activists have lobbed petrol bombs and set bonfires in the streets, while police officers fired tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray, making more than 1,100 arrests since early June. Hong Kong stocks jumped, led by property developers, after news reports said Mrs Lam will formally withdraw the extradition Bill that has sparked months of protests. The benchmark Hang Seng Index surged as much as 3.9 per cent before paring gains to 3.4 per cent at 3.06pm local time. The turmoil that followed Mrs Lam's attempt to introduce the ill-fated Bill - including mass marches that drew more than 1 million people and protests that shut the city's busy airport - have turned into the biggest crisis for Beijing's rule over the former British colony since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Linda Kim HONG KONG, August 26 -- China sent the strongest warning yet of using troops on Hong Kong's streets, where Beijing says protests have turned into a "Colour Revolution", with water cannons and tear gas fired in skirmishes between police and demonstrators in the 12th straight weekend of unrest. "It's not only the China central government's authority but also its responsibility to intervene when riots take place in Hong Kong," the state-run Xinhua News Agency said on Sunday (Aug 25) in a commentary, recalling comments by former top leader Deng Xiaoping that Beijing has to act under such circumstances. United States President Donald Trump said on Aug 13 that reports from US intelligence agencies show the Chinese government is moving troops to its border with Hong Kong. A day earlier, Global Times, a Chinese tabloid run by the People's Daily, reported that the Chinese People's Armed Police were assembling in Shenzhen ahead of "apparent large-scale exercises", where "numerous" armoured personnel carriers, trucks and other vehicles of the paramilitary force were seen heading towards Hong Kong's neighbouring city. In Sunday's commentary, Xinhua said Hong Kong's protests have turned into a Colour Revolution aimed at overturning the Special Administrative Region's constitutional institutions, a signal it was ready to take further action. Previously, Chinese officials described the protests as having some characteristics of a "Colour Revolution". Protesters' violent acts have pushed Hong Kong to an extremely dangerous edge, the city's government said in a statement after a day full of violent clashes between demonstrators and the police, where an officer fired warning shots in the air. |
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