Beijing – A country that turns grey before wealthy is the dilemma facing those who reside in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, just off Tiananmen Square.
A demographic timebomb is ticking and while it is primed to go off after the current leadership in China retires, it is a scenario that could undermine the economy and political stability long before the predicted detonation.
Despite the abolition of the one-child policy, in 2015, the birth rate last year was 10.94 per thousand, the lowest since 1949, when Mao Zedong took power. In 2017 it was 12.43 per thousand, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. The number of babies born in 2018 fell by two million to 15.23 million. In some areas the birth rate plunged. In Qingdao, a city in eastern Shandong province – one of China’s most populous regions – births between January and November decreased by 21 per cent to just over 81,000 compared to the previous year.
For decades most families were limited to one child to control population growth. This policy was often enforced with abortions and harsh financial penalties. A gender imbalance occurred. About 117 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2015 as parents believed males would better secure their welfare in old age.
But the onset of an ageing society and a shrinking workforce saw this policy relaxed in 2015 when couples were allowed two children. But his has not gone to plan. Rising and stratospheric education, health and housing costs make it difficult for couples to afford even one child, let alone two. Also living arrangements mean that many couples have to look after both sets of parents, often in small apartments.
Traditionally, care for the elderly is the responsibility of the children, particularly in a Confucian society where respect for elders is part of the social fabric. Not only is it part of tradition, it is the law. There is a legal requirement for children to look after their parents’ “spiritual and physical needs”. The rising numbers of those classified in the ranks of the elderly will put an unprecedented strain on the ties that hold society together.
China’s workforce – those aged between 16 and 59 – was 897.3 million last year, a 4.7 million drop from 2017. The workforce is on track to decline by as much as 23 per cent by 2050.
China is ageing more rapidly than almost any country in recent history, according to the United Nations. A serious labor shortage will be the consequence.
There were about 222 million people aged 60 years or older as of 2015, about 17 per cent of the nation’s entire population, currently 1.3 billion people. This is expected to peak at 1.4 billion in 2029. The decline will set in immediately after that according to a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences study released in January. The population decline means less domestic consumption, and thus rapidly slowing economic growth. Spending will have to be re-evaluated by new financial strains on the government. The consequences of this will be felt far beyond China’s borders. It was Chinese spending that helped the West avoid an even steeper downturn after the 2008-9 crash.
A baby boom under Mao was followed by more than three decades of a one-child policy, formally introduced in 1979, that created distortions in the economy. True, many poor people in the countryside, where the policy was less strictly enforced, had more than one child. The wealthy, traditionally in the cities, had one. These were the inheritors. That generation of first wealth was passed down to one child instead of dividing it up among siblings. Wealth was concentrated in the coastal areas. This created enormous distortions. Disparity between rich and poor is obvious. The richest 1 percent of households own 30 percent of China’s wealth, according to a Peking University study.
China has relied on government credit to boost its economy. As the population ages, the government will need to divert a good chunk of that funding to take care of the elderly.
In one sense, it is testament to the country’s growing prosperity and new opportunities for women they prioritize careers over raising children and shun traditional roles.
This is already apparent, though not in the government, still exclusively male. But women are outperforming men in education and the workplace. More women than men attend universities, despite the gender imbalance. At least 40 percent of Chinese GDP is attributable to women – the highest proportion in the world. Some 7 in 10 Chinese mothers work outside the home and 80 percent of all female self-made billionaires, globally, are Chinese.
A society undergoing such profound change is ripe for instability.
There are sleepless nights in Zhongnanhai.
Tom Clifford is a freelance journalist and can be reached at: cliffordtomsan@hotmail.com.
A senior official in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has called on Arab nations to change their decades-long strategy of having no diplomatic relations with Israel, which he brands as a mistake.
Anwar Gargash, the tiny Persian Gulf regime’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said that the Arab world needed a “strategic shift” in its ties with the regime in Tel Aviv.
“Many, many years ago, when there was an Arab decision not to have contact with Israel, that was a very, very wrong decision, looking back,” he told the UAE-based news website The National.
“The strategic shift needs actually for us to progress on the peace front,” said Gargash, who also believed that the boycott of Israel has made finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more complicated.
“From the perspective of the UAE, we do need to resolve it, because this issue has this tendency of jumping out of the background when it’s quiet to suddenly becoming headline news.”
Among the Arab countries, the governments of Egypt and Jordan are the only ones having formal diplomatic ties with Israel.
The call for open ties with Israel comes after US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Syria’s occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territories.
Israel occupied the area during the Six-Day War with Arab armies in 1967 and went on to annex the East Jerusalem al-Quds. The international community has condemned both moves and repeatedly called on Israel to give back the territories.
Trump, however, recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the Israeli “capital” in December 2017 and moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient city in May last year, sparking global condemnations.
Israel lays claim to the whole city, but the Palestinians view it as the capital of their future sovereign state. The city has been designated as “occupied” under international law since it fell to Israel.
The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, are known to have secretly developed expansive ties with Tel Aviv over the past years.
Israeli media reported in late January that UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the country’s national security adviser had paid a not-so-secret visit to Israel with a direct flight from Abu Dhabi to Tel Aviv.
The trip came a few days after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a tour of regional countries in a bid to unite Arab countries and the Israeli regime against Iran.
In an interview with Fox News on January 4, Pompeo was asked about an unofficial anti-Iran alliance between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan.
“Undoubtedly. We have set the conditions in the Middle East where these countries are now working together across multiple fronts,” Pompeo said.
The outgoing chief of staff of the Israeli military, Gadi Eisenkot, reportedly made two secret visits in November to the United Arab Emirates, where he met with senior officials.
In June, the New Yorker magazine reported that Israel had maintained a secret but extremely close relationship with the UAE for more than two decades, with a special focus on intelligence sharing and military cooperation, including potential weapons deals
The U.S. State Department is offering to pay up to a million dollars each for two projects “that counter the rise of anti-Semitism” in Europe and Central Asia. The State Department uses a new definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticisms of Israel.
The projects will be funded through two State Department offices: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism envoy position was created through 2004 legislation over the objection of the State Department. All four such envoys have been Israel partisans.
The objective of the new projects, according to the announcement of the program, is to address anti-Semitism abroad that is manifested in several ways, including “the use of hateful or inflammatory speech in public discourse, traditional media and online.” The announcement does not specify what language will be considered “hateful or inflammatory speech.” (In the U.S., the First Amendment prohibits the censorship of free speech.)
Special Anti-Semitism Envoy Hannah Rosenthal adopted the new Israel-centric definition of anti-Semitism in 2009. The formulation had been created by Israeli minister Natan Sharansky.
The new projects will “include training law enforcement to adequately and holistically respond to hate crimes from a legal, social, and community perspective; and to better equip police and prosecutors to engage effectively with local Jewish populations.”
The grants will be available to both nonprofit organizations and for-profit, commercial businesses. Organizations winning the grants may be allowed to keep aspects of their identity secret.
The current Anti-Semitism Envoy is Elan Carr, who ran for Congress in 2014 with the promise that he would be “a reliable vote for Israel.” Carr, who was backed by billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said he visits Israel every year.
Hardly a week goes by and the United States falls deeper into global disrepute. This week was a bonanza of own goals for the self-declared “leader of the free world”.
The debacle over the ridiculous “Russiagate” scandal finally imploding was spectacular.
Then there were more horrific reports of US air strikes killing civilians simultaneously in four countries – Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
That was followed by Washington’s ludicrous lecturing to Russia about the US-imposed humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
And then, to top all those own goals, we saw President Donald Trump declaring that Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights is not, in the warped US view, illegal after all. Can you possibly keep score of the mind-boggling inanities and insanities?
Switching metaphors for a moment – because you can hardly just use one when it comes to grappling with American asinine policy – Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova got it right when she likened the US to a “cowboy shooting up the Louvre museum” in its free-wheeling, double-dealing foreign conduct.
Where to begin in dissecting the US and its descent into madness and mafia-style foreign policy? It truly is a brain-wrecking, train-wrecking challenge. Is there a wicked genius to its Mephistophelean madness? Perhaps it is simply down to Washington becoming an absurd circus of incompetence, accelerated under the administration of a former real-estate magnate and reality TV star, President Donald J (for Joker) Trump.
On the Golan issue, Trump’s proclamation this week of recognizing the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as under Israeli sovereignty is a flagrant subversion of international law and the United Nations Charter. Israel has been forcibly occupying Syrian southern territory since the 1967 Six Day War. It formally annexed the strategic plateau in 1981, which was ruled as illegal by the UN Security Council – including a vote from the US at that time.
Trump’s declaration is thus a brazen repudiation of international law and a glaring green light to aggression. Can anything this president says or does be taken seriously? What’s that about Venezuela, or Ukraine?
His declaration this week undermines gravely the foundation of international law in a shocking, reckless affront. It completely demolishes any pretense the US claims to have as a world leader and upholder of international law.
Washington has been slamming Russia for the past five years over alleged “annexation” of Crimea – and then Trump this week turns around and endorses Israeli theft of Syrian territory.
At a UN Security Council meeting called this week by Syria in protest to Trump’s proclamation, the US was seen as a pariah state. All 14 other members of the council (including non-permanent members) slammed the US policy on Golan. They included US allies Britain and France.
Outside the UNSC, other US allies also condemned Washington’s declaration of complicity in Israeli annexation of Golan.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, among others, all slammed the US for daring to legalize the theft of Syrian territory by Israel.
Russia’s deputy envoy to the UN, Vladimir Safronkov, put it aptly. He said that the US move was not only an audacious violation of international and the UN Charter. “This only exacerbates the situation in Syria and complicates the establishment of a political process, but it also creates serious obstacles to normalizing the relations between Israel and the Arab states.”
We will come back to that profound point in a moment. But first, let’s throw out a few other motives for Trump’s outrageous violation of international law regarding Golan and Israel’s annexation.
Trump is no doubt giving his family friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a timely electoral boost ahead of Israeli state elections scheduled for April 9.
There is also the issue of American oil interests being pursued by designating the Golan as Israeli territory. The mountainous region overlooking the Jordan Valley is reputed to hold untapped reserves on par with those of Saudi Arabia, which US-based Genie oil company has been exploring for years.
But still a more strategic motive is the objective of keeping the Middle East and Syria in particular in perpetual turmoil. By annexing Syrian territory, the US-Israeli move furthers the objective of controlling the wider Arab region.
Syria’s envoy to the UN, Bashar al Jaafari, made that very point at the UN Security Council meeting this week. He said the US-backed annexation of Golan was a part of the US-sponsored covert war against his country. The move is a way to keep Syria and the region in turmoil, said al Jaafari.
This gets back to what the Russian envoy, Vladimir Safronkov, said. The whole point is for Washington to prevent any political settlement to the eight-year war in Syria and to impede any normalization of relations in the region. The US and its client Israeli regime only stand to benefit from perpetual chaos and conflict in the region.
So far so good, as Washington may calculate – albeit fiendishly. But in the final analysis, the US is ending up looking like a complete rogue state without any respect, even among its supposed allies.
The presumed global leader, Washington, is losing foes and allies alike through its disgraceful duplicity and disregard for any pretense of probity. The Golan Heights is another nail in the coffin for Washington’s over-rated self-regard.
In a week of other American absurdities and own-goals, the Golan debacle may turn out to be the moment when Washington is finally seen in the eyes of the world as the utter laughing stock that it surely has become. It’s a laughing stock, but in the creepiest, macabre sense.
To this day Central Asia remains an arena of struggle for a number of major international players, namely Russia, China and the United States. In this struggle, Washington has now started losing its influence, which resulted in a series of desperate attempts to establish a sound foothold in this region, which could serve as a bulwark against both Russia and China. Against this backdrop, it’s no coincidence that the so-called private intelligence service known as Stratfor would reveal in its forecast for this year that the United States is planning to step up its efforts in Central Asia, especially in those countries that share a common border with Afghanistan, namely Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. This service won’t go into much detail about the efforts it’s referring to, but it’s hardly a secret that Washington has been busy redeploying radical Islamists from Syria, where they are getting defeated by the government forces and its allies, to Afghanistan, while making claims about its devotion to the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking.
In this situation, a relatively small regional player – Tajikistan found itself at the forefront of Washington’s attempt to push Moscow and Beijing out of the region. The US is particularly interested in influencing the foreign policy pursued by Dushanbe due to the two following reasons.
First of all, Tajikistan is not just an immediate neighbor of Afghanistan, but it shares the longest common border with this country out of all of the former Soviet republics – 800 miles in total. Secondly, Dushanbe has been enjoying close ties with Russia, which resulted in Moscow establishing its largest overseas military installation in Tajikistan – the 201st Military Base.
Due to the negligible size of its economy and its relative geographic isolation, Tajikistan can hardly be described as a promising trade partner of the United States, as Western oligarchs would have a hard time justifying investments in this country. So, the only approach that Washington can take in influencing Tajikistan into those decisions that it’s not willing to make is to complain about Dushanbe undermining democratic values, while pursuing closer military cooperation with it. For instance, as it’s been reported by a number of media sources, last year the Pentagon handed out 8 million dollars worth of military equipment to Dushanbe.
However, the situation on the ground may change rather abruptly and unexpectedly at any given moment. For instance, on the back of a long list of complaints Washington has made about Dushanbe being “not democratic enough” the West may decide to pursue a regime change in this country, which will result in the CIA and the Pentagon cutting costs on the illegal transit of opiates from Afghanistan.
That is why, in order to achieve its goals, the United States has been actively promoting the notion of establishing a regional young leadership network in Central Asia, under which young activists from Central Asian states would be able to receive education in Western universities together with the offspring of the regional elites. It goes without saying that after returning home those youngsters would promote Western neoliberal ideas, pedaling American interests like there’s no tomorrow. That is why Washington spends hundreds of millions of dollars on sponsoring various non-governmental organizations in Tajikistan.
In recent years, a large network of various organizations has been working for American money in the country, including, among others, the Soros Foundation, the Aga Khan, the Institute of War and Peace, and so on. In fact, there’s there’s well over 3,000 non-profit organizations registered in Tajikistan, with most of them being involved in the promotion of Western interests, including news agencies and law firms.
Back in the early 90s the United States and Tajikistan signed a deal on mutual attempts to facilitate the promotion of humanitarian and technical assistance. It’s hard to say how much money Washington has spent so far while promoting its narrative in Dushanbe, but it’s clear that USAID alone spent some 450 million dollars on such activities in the last three decades alone.
However, a series of “color revolutions” that Washington staged across the globe resulted in a considerable tightening of anti-NGO legislation in Tajikistan, which means that Dushanbe has been steadily increasing its ability to shape the internal situation within the country.
Now the US is testing a new strategy of coercion developed at the Pentagon for Venezuela and a number of other countries that dare to disagree publicly with Washington. It involves the use of a number of leverages, including financial sanctions and offensive online operations against the target country, along with the support of the political opposition and continuous threats of imminent military aggression.
There’s every reason to believe that the United States is going to test this new approach in Tajikistan, combining anti-government street protests with armed “revolutionary” jihad mounted by radical forces and, quite possibly, supported by a rebellion of local criminal groups. At the same time, Washington’s calculations of such developments clearly suggest that the leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, Muhiddin Kabiri would be advertised as the new leader of Tajikistan, while the prominent Badakhshan drug dealers would be tasked with fielding militants to support the runaway Tajik commander of the special forces who defected to ISIS, Gulmurod Khalimov. The Tajik portal Akhbor, in particular, has already announced that the United States initiated the transfer of elite ISIS fighters from Afghanistan that are being led by Halimov, with Saudi Arabia footing the bill for this operation.
Against this background, the arrival of the new US ambassador to Dushanbe, John Pommersheim can only be regarded as a troubling development. Pommersheim is considered to be one of the best experts on Russia in the entire State Department, as he would study Russian in Moscow after obtain scholarship from the US Department of Defense. The man who made a career at the US Information Agency (USIA) back in the 1980s is being transferred to Tajikistan from the US embassy in Kazakhstan. Moreover, Pommersheim is reverted as an expert on Central Asia and the Caucasus. His appointment in Tajikistan further demonstrates Washington’s growing interest in Central Asia. By using Tajikistan as a bridgehead, the United States can inflict extensive damage to both Russia and China, that are being described as the strategic opponents of Washington. In particular, should it succeed in destabilizing Central Asia, Washington would render the entire concept of the One Belt One Road initiative senseless, which implies China reorienting its trade routes to Europe from sea to land.
Of course, it would be naive to assume that John Pommersheim will start staging a “color revolution” in Dushanbe on the day of his arrival. As of now, the US cannot build enough momentum to force Russia or China out of Tajikistan. Instead it’s going to support all sorts of anti-Chinese and anti-Russian sentiments, taking advantage of the network of NGOs, the tactics that Pommersheim managed to master a long while ago.
We are going to follow the achievements of Pommersheim in Dushanbe rather closely, as it seems unlikely that Washington would have sent such a figure to Tajikistan for him just to enjoy the view.
Although Berlin has sided with the US and recognised self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido, it is keeping Otto Gebauer, whom he picked to represent Venezuela in Germany, in limbo and has not granted the representative key diplomatic status. Spain, above all, has reportedly urged fellow EU member states not to recognise him.
Although Otto Gebauer, sent to Germany by self-proclaimed interim president of Venezuela Juan Guaido as his emissary, was received in Berlin, the German government does not plan to accredit him, as the newspaper Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung reports, citing the Foreign Ministry’s response to a request by the left-wing party Die Linke.
According to it, the German government first received Gebauer as “personal representative of Interim President Guaido” on 13 March 2019 to hold talks with him, but “further steps are not planned”. The outlet also reports that, above all, Spain has called on other EU member states not to grant Guaido’s representatives any diplomatic status or corresponding privileges.
Since a political crisis broke out in Venezuela in late January, when parliamentary opposition leader Guaido, backed by the US, declared himself the interim president of Venezuela after disputing President Nicolas Maduro’s re-election last May, Germany recognised him as a transitional head of state. Around 50 states, encouraged by the US, did the same. However, the constitutionally elected head of state Nicolas Maduro, supported by Russia, China, Cuba, Bolivia, Turkey and a number of other countries, continues to hold power and refuses to step down, accusing Washington of trying to orchestrate a coup in order to install Guaido as a puppet leader.
This has led to a paradoxical situation in Germany, leaving it with two Venezuelan emissaries in Berlin but not being able to hold official talks with both of them.
Die Linke praised the decision to restrain from recognising Gebauer as ambassador. Lawmaker from the German parliamentary foreign affairs committee Heike Haensel pointed out that “dispatching of new representatives for Venezuela is based on the recognition of self-appointed President Juan Guaido in violation of international law”, according to the conclusion of the Bundestag’s probe.
“This proves the absurdity of Germany’s Venezuela policy. Recognising Guaido was manoeuvered outside the bounds of international law and this rows it back again”, she said.
Apart from this diplomatic collision, Otto Gebauer has a debatable profile for a diplomat as he was involved in a 2002 coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez, who passed away several years ago. He was a member of the commando unit that held Chavez prisoner and served six years in prison for it.
The legitimacy of interim president Guiado himself is being challenged now as under Venezuelan law his maximum term is limited to a 30-day period. It expired in February while new elections have not yet been announced.
Now that US President Donald Trump has finally been cleared of the ridiculous Russia Collusion charge, his top priority should be to reduce tensions with Moscow sensibly – and the place to start doing that is to fire John Bolton, his national security adviser at once.
The case for this is urgent and the preservation of world peace will depend upon whether Trump renews his courage and acts accordingly or lets himself once more be passively manipulated along the road to new endless wars and war crimes as the previous Republican President George W. Bush was by Bolton and his neocon friends.
All the signs are that, on the contrary, Bolton – along with his lifelong close friends Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Special Envoy to Restore Democracy in Venezuela Eliot Abrams have Trump still completely in their pockets. And that they remain determined to topple the legitimate democratically elected government of Venezuela, despite the grave warnings from Moscow to stop doing so.
On March 20, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met Abrams In Rome and flatly warned him Moscow would not tolerate any direct US military intervention in Venezuela to topple President Nicolas Maduro and replace him with America’s farcical puppet fake President Juan Guaido. As Finian Cunningham wrote in the columns of Strategic Culture Foundation, “The encounter in Rome… was described as ‘frank’ and ‘serious’ – which is diplomatic code for a blazing exchange.”
Ryabkov said after the meeting, “We assume that Washington treats our priorities seriously, our approach and warnings.”
But did Abrams honestly and accurately give his boss, the President of the United States an accurate and honest report of Ryabkov’s very serious warning?
We should seriously suspect this never happened but that, on the contrary, Abrams, and his master Bolton “protected” the man they are supposed to loyally serve from this “inconvenient truth.”
This certainly seems to be the case: For on March 27, Trump told reporters after meeting with Guaido’s wife in Washington that Russia had to get out of Venezuela, When asked how he would make Russia leave, Trump said: “We’ll see. All options are open.”
Earlier, the same day, Vice President Mike Pence, who is no fool but who has prospered mightily from often pretending to act like one, called on Russia to abandon its support for Maduro and “stand with Juan Guaido.”
It is clear, therefore, that Trump – and Pence – have not taken Ryabkov’s warning, conveyed through Abrams – if in fact he conveyed it at all – seriously for a second.
It must again be stressed: Behind Abrams stands John Bolton: The two men worked together like Siamese twins in orchestrating the bloody suppression of the Mayan peoples of Central America under President Ronald Reagan. Then, they worked overtime together to help orchestrate the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under President George W. Bush. Now they are at it again and the legitimate government of Venezuela is in their sights.
Bolton was implacable in his determination to scrap the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and Russia and he continues to crush all possibilities for strategic arms control and cooperation in his fanatical and unrelenting grip. Trump has supported him enthusiastically on this at every step and shows no signs whatsoever of regret or second thought.
Bolton and Trump were obviously in full accord on recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights – a move that is certain to drive Syria and Iran closer to Moscow than ever and that can only motivate Damascus to pose new challenges for both Israel and the United States in retaliation as soon as possible.
All efforts to portray the US president as still eager to improve relations with Russia and avoid potentially catastrophic clashes with Moscow must therefore be rejected. As Sigmund Freud rightly said, often the obvious explanation is the correct one: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. If Bolton looks, acts and sounds like a dangerous warmongering fanatic that is because he is a dangerous warmongering fanatic.
If Trump remains at all serious about the courageous declarations of wanting to improve ties with Russia that he made repeatedly during his 2016 presidential campaign, he should therefore celebrate his total exoneration on Russia collusion charges by Special Counsel Robert Mueller by firing Bolton immediately and seeking to start a serious constructive dialogue with Moscow. No such dialogue is remotely possible while Bolton stands at Trump’s right hand, endlessly deferential to him and whispering in his ear, determined to prevent it.
Bolton must go. The security and survival of the United States and indeed of the entire human race demand it.
Russia is not seeking to erect a Chinese-style “great firewall” with new legislation on the ‘sovereign internet’ or otherwise regulate the web, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has said.
The bill, introduced to the State Duma in December, envisions a set of measures to allow the ‘Runet’ – the Russian part of the internet – to operate autonomously in case of a global web shutdown or a cut-off of Russian IP addresses from it.
The legislation prompted speculation that the Russian government was seeking to regulate and censor the web – or even create a secluded one of its own. Such fears are unsubstantiated and the goal of the bill is entirely different, Medvedev said on Friday while speaking to users of Vkontakte online.
“Certainly, we won’t have Chinese-style regulations. And I’ll tell you more, even in China, such regulation does not often yield the results it was designed for,” Medvedev said. “Moreover, we are not even seeking regulation. No firewall will emerge here.”
The optimum scenario regarding internet regulation is to have an international mechanism of sorts, Medvedev believes, but the emergence of such a system – or a convention at least – appears to belong to the future.
“The overwhelming majority of the keys to regulate [the internet] is located at one single country – the United States of America,” Medvedev stated. “The technology, which has become universal, which is used by billions of people, is largely regulated by a single country. That’s not very good actually.”
The legislation was initially drafted in response to a new US cyber strategy that accuses Russia, along with China, Iran, and North Korea, of using the web to “undermine” its ‘democracy’ and economy. The strategy also threatens a strong response against those who dare to conduct cyber activities against the US.
“We must protect our interests, not to switch off anything ourselves, but to prevent us from getting cut off. That is quite possible,” the prime minister stated.
“Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy”, read the front page headline of Sunday’s New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.
There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump’s own family, leading seedy characters to “flip” on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller’s sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they’re coming around.
The question still remains, though: what the hell happened? How did a fact-free conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among mainstream Americans? How were millions of people persuaded to invest hope in a narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to be completely false?
The answer is that they were told that the Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over again by politicians and mass media pundits, and, because of a peculiar phenomenon in the nature of human cognition, this repetition made it seem true.
The rather uncreatively-named illusory truth effect describes the way people are more likely to believe something is true after hearing it said many times. This is due to the fact that the familiar feeling we experience when hearing something we’ve heard before feels very similar to our experience of knowing that something is true. When we hear a familiar idea, its familiarity provides us with something called cognitive ease, which is the relaxed, unlabored state we experience when our minds aren’t working hard at something. We also experience cognitive ease when we are presented with a statement that we know to be true.
We have a tendency to select for cognitive ease, which is why confirmation bias is a thing; believing ideas which don’t cause cognitive strain or dissonance gives us more cognitive ease than doing otherwise. Our evolutionary ancestors adapted to seek out cognitive ease so that they could put their attention into making quick decisions essential for survival, rather than painstakingly mulling over whether everything we believe is as true as we think it is. This was great for not getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers in prehistoric times, but it’s not very helpful when navigating the twists and turns of a cognitively complex modern world. It’s also not helpful when you’re trying to cultivate truthful beliefs while surrounded by screens that are repeating the same bogus talking points over and over again.
I’m dealing with a perfect example of the perils of cognitive ease right now. Writing this essay has required me to move outside my familiar comfort zone of political commentary and read a bunch of studies and essays, think hard about new ideas, and then figure out how to convey them as clearly and concisely as possible without boring my audience. This movement away from cognitive ease has resulted in my checking Twitter a lot more often than I usually do, and seeking so much distraction that this essay will probably end up getting published about twelve hours later than I had intended. Having to read a bunch of scholars explaining the precise reasons why I’m acting like such an airhead hasn’t exactly helped my sense of cognitive ease any, either.
Science has been aware of the illusory truth effect since 1977, when a study found that subjects were more likely to evaluate a statement as true when it’s been repeatedly presented to them over the course of a couple of weeks, even if they didn’t consciously remember having encountered that statement before. These findings have been replicated in numerous studies since, and new research in recent years has shown that the phenomenon is even more drastic than initially believed. A 2015 paper titled “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth” found that the illusory truth effect is so strong that sheer repetition can change the answers that test subjects give, even when they had been in possession of knowledge contradicting that answer beforehand. This study was done to test the assumption which had gone unchallenged up until then that the illusory truth effect only comes into play when there is no stored knowledge of the subject at hand.
“Surprisingly, repetition increased statements’ perceived truth, regardless of whether stored knowledge could have been used to detect a contradiction,” the paper reads. “Reading a statement like ‘A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots’ increased participants’ later belief that it was true, even if they could correctly answer the question ‘What is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots?’”
Stored knowledge tells pretty much everybody that the “short, pleated skirt worn by Scots” is a kilt, not a sari, but simply repeating the contrary statement can convince them otherwise.
This explains why we all know people who are extraordinarily intelligent, but still bought into the Russiagate narrative just as much as our less mentally apt friends and acquaintances. Their intelligence didn’t save them from this debunked conspiracy theory, it just made them more clever in finding ways of defending it. This is because the illusory truth effect largely bypasses the intellect, and even one’s own stored knowledge, because of the way we all reflexively select for cognitive ease.
You can understand, then, how a populace who is consuming repetitive assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions on a daily basis through the screens that they look at many times a day could be manipulated into believing that Robert Mueller would one day reveal evidence which will lead to the destruction of the Trump administration. The repetition leads to belief, the belief leads to trust, and before you know it people who are scared of the president are reading the Palmer Report every day and parking themselves in front of Rachel Maddow every night and letting everything they say slide right past their skepticism filters, marinating comfortably in a sedative of cognitive ease.
And that repetition has been no accident. CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on video nearly two years ago admitting that CNN’s CEO Jeff Zucker was personally instructing his staff to stay focused on Russia even in the midst of far more important breaking news stories.
“My boss, I shouldn’t say this, my boss yesterday we were having a discussion about this dental shoot and he goes and he was just like I want you to know what we are up against here,” Bonifield told an undercover associate of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. “And he goes, just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with it, let’s get back to Russia.”
(And before you get on me about O’Keefe’s shady record, CNN said in a statement that the video was legitimate and disputed none of its content, saying only that it stands by Bonifield and that “Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it and embrace it.”)
Zucker, for his part, told the New York Times in an article published yesterday that he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s role in promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory the way that it did.
“We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” Zucker said. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”
“We are not investigators”? What the fuck kind of dumbass shit is that? So it’s not your job to investigate whether what you’re reporting is true or false? It’s not your job to investigate whether the anonymous sources you’re basing your reports on might be lying or not? It’s not your job to investigate whether or not you’d be committing journalistic malpractice with the multiple completely bullshit stories your outlet has been humiliated by in the last two years? It’s not your job to weigh the consequences of deliberately monopolizing public attention on a narrative which consists of nothing but confident-sounding assertions and innuendo?
“We are not investigators.” So? You’re not dentists or firefighters either, what’s your point? That has nothing to do with the mountains of journalistic malpractice you’ve been perpetrating by advancing this conspiracy theory, nor with the inexcusable brutalization you’ve been inflicting upon the American psyche with your deliberate nonstop repetition of bogus assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions.
The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. If you think about how many advances have been made in other military fields over the last hundred years, that gives you a clear example of how sophisticated an understanding the social engineers must now have of the methods of mass manipulation of human psychology. We may be absolutely certain that there are people who’ve been working to drive the public narratives about western rivals like Russia, and that they are doing so with a far greater understanding of the concepts we’ve touched on in this essay than we have at our disposal.
The manipulators understand our psyches better than we understand them ourselves, and they’re getting more clever, not less. The only thing we can do to keep our heads while immersed in a society that is saturated with propaganda is be as relentlessly honest as possible, with ourselves and with the world. We’ll never be able to out-manipulate the master manipulators, but we can be real with ourselves about whether or not we’re selecting for cognitive ease rather than thinking rigorously and clearly. We can be truthful with our friends, family, coworkers and social media followers wherever untruth seems to be taking hold. We can do our very best to shine the light of truth on the puppeteers wherever we spot them and ruin the whole goddamn show for everyone.
It may not seem like a lot, but truth is the one thing they can’t manipulate, whether it’s truth about them, truth about the world, or truthfulness with yourself. The lying manipulators got us into this mess, so only truth can get us out.
US Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has continued to push a tale of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian actors without taking into consideration the truth or facts of the matter, journalist and author Daniel Lazare told Sputnik.
“It’s been utterly outrageous,” Lazare told Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear on Thursday. “He has pounded the story into the ground with no regard for the truth whatsoever.”
“Back in March 2017, when the House Intelligence Committee had its first hearing on Russiagate, Schiff devoted roughly 15 or 20 minutes to a point by point recitation of the Steele dossier. Everything from the golden showers to Cohen’s secret rendezvous in Prague to Trump cavorting with prostitutes on another occasion… and there’s just no concern for the truth,” he continued.
“Truth is irrelevant, it’s whatever will get him campaign donations, whatever gets him airtime on CNN. It’s a complete outrage.”
On Thursday during a House Intelligence Committee hearing, every Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, which Schiff chairs, called for the California democrat to resign from his post, citing his”willingness to continue to promote a demonstrably false narrative” regarding alleged collusion.
A letter signed by all Republican members of the committee and read by Rep. Mike Conaway states that Schiff has been “at the center of a well-orchestrated media campaign claiming, among other things, the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government.”
“The findings of the Special Counsel conclusively refute your past and present assertions and have exposed you as having abused your position to knowingly promote false information, having damaged the integrity of this Committee, and undermined faith in US government institutions,” the letter added.
Schiff responded to the sudden turn of events by raising a list of questionable interactions between Trump campaign officials and Russian actors.
“My colleagues may think it is OK that the president’s son was offered dirt as part of an effort to help Trump… You might think it is OK. I don’t,” the US lawmaker said, occasionally pausing for dramatic effect.
The call for Schiff’s resignation comes just one day after US Sen. Rand Paul fired off a tweet revealing that a “high-level source” informed him that “it was [former CIA Director John] Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence report.”
Paul went on to call for Brennan to testify under oath before Congress about his involvement in pushing the dossier, which helped to kick off special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion.
Lazare told host Brian Becker that it’s “imperative” that Brennan be required to testify under oath in order to better understand just how Washington became enveloped in the collusion investigation.
“It’s absolutely imperative that we figure out how this happened,” Lazare stressed. “[We need to] get to the bottom of it and expose those who were guilty in this whole misadventure.”
On November 8, 2016, Vladimir Putin won the US presidential election by getting his Manchurian Candidate, Доналд Трумп, into the White House as the crowning achievement of a decades-long plan to use pee tape kompromat and real estate deals that never happened to get a reality TV star installed in the Oval Office.
Mind-controlling the US public with hundreds of dollars of Facebook Jesus memes, this modern-day Czar carefully rigged the election by (not) hacking into any voting systems and by (not) hacking into the DNC servers, revealing that the DNC had rigged the election against 27 Dollars and in favour of Why Aren’t I 50 Points Ahead, You Might Ask.
And Saint Mueller was on the job commanding an army of 40 agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 witnesses 230 communication records and a partridge in a pear tree, so we all knew that the walls are closing in.
The media admitted that the story was mostly bullshit, but that’s OK because we’re living in a post-truth world and democracy dies in darkness.
The #Resistance spent years supporting disgraced attorneys, deranged liars and anyone else who would support their narrative, but that’s OK because votes only count when your candidate wins.
And after two years of investigation, Mueller delivered a report that brought some “troubling news . . . our president is not a Russian asset,” but that’s OK because everyone knows Trump is a Russian agent anyway, so who needs that stupid Mueller guy?
And now President Putin and his orange cheeto puppet are laughing all the way to the brink of nuclear war in the Cold War 2.0 cheered on by the neo-neocons and their neolib friends and made possible by a neo-mccarthyist purge of dissenting voices.
If you doubt any part of this story you are a no good, dirty, treasonous, alt-right Russian bot troll who deserves to be censored from the internet forever.
If you love truth, sunshine, ice cream, rainbows, kitty cats and the 4th of July then you will never question any part of this story.
EVER.
This message has been brought to you by the Friends of the DNC, MSMBS, The Rachel Maddow Retirement Fund, Clinton For 2020 and the CIA.
Excerpt from a speech by former Republican Congressman Paul N. “Pete” McCloskey, Jr. on “Israel, the Anti Defamation League and Free Speech.”
McCloskey has had a long history of service to the United States: as a U.S. Marine, an environmentalist, and an opponent to unnecessary wars.
McCloskey was born and raised in California, graduating from Stanford University.
During Korean War service with the Marine Corps, he earned the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.
From 1967 to 1983 he served as a U.S. congressman. He was co-chairman of the First Earth Day, 1970.
He was an early opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the first Republican in Congress to call for the impeachment of President Nixon. In 1972 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican party presidential nomination.
A documentary about McCloskey, narrated by Paul Newman, can be seen at: https://iakn.us/2FkMqTQ
The video above is from a speech he gave in 2000 at a conference for the Institute of Historical Review.
By the 1980s the ADL’s main purpose was no longer to try to stop anti-Semitism and bigotry, but instead to discredit any voice that was hostile to the policies of Israel – and not only to discredit people who spoke out against Israel, but to deny them a forum.
McCloskey describes the ADL’s work in spying on Americans.
For more about McCloskey’s contentious relationship with the pro-Israel lobby, see former Illinois Congressman Paul Findley’s book, “They Dare to Speak Out.” (A documentary about Findley is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBsrV… )
World War II is often called “the good war,” and has been since the U.S. war on Vietnam to which it was then contrasted. World War II so dominates U.S. and therefore Western entertainment and education, that “good” often comes to mean something more than “just.” The winner of the “Miss Italy” beauty pageant earlier this year got herself into a bit of a scandal by declaring that she would have liked to live through World War II. While she was mocked, she was clearly not alone. Many would like to be part of something widely depicted as noble, heroic, and exciting. Should they actually find a time machine, I recommend they read the statements of some actual WWII veterans and survivors before they head back to join the fun.[i] For purposes of this book, however, I am going to look only at the claim that WWII was morally just. … continue
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