Entnazifizierung - Karikatur von Stury (1948)
tag > Politics
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Yaroslav Lissovolik on pandemic and migration flows
We’ve seen a significant structural break in migration flows because of the pandemic, said Yaroslav Lissovolik, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club. Due to his opinion it could reflect on national economies, especially in developing countries where remittances give a significant part of GDP. Yaroslav Lissovolik analyzed opportunities to cope with this situation.
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No Escape from Our Techno-Feudal World - By Pepe Escobar
This article was originally published on Asia Times.
The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.
Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.
We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.
The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.
In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.
Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.
Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.
Those Randian heroes
Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.
When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.
That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.
Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.
On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.
The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.
So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.
Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable, online real estate empire is built.
The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.
About the Chinese credit system…
Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.
For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.
The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.
Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.
Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.
And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.
It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”
So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:
a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.
Blake meets Burroughs
Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.
The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.
Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).
William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.
William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.
Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.
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Your Guide to the Great Monetary Reset
Princes of the Yen: Central Bank Truth Documentary
SHADOW GATE – Documentary by Millie Weaver - 2020
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The CIA’s Secret Global War Against the Left - by Branko Marcetic (jacobinmag)
Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.
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The week in review, focus on corona
Your obedience is prolonging this nightmare
- AstraZeneca to be exempt from coronavirus-vaccine liability claims in most countries
- Coronavirus vaccine: Pfizer given protection from legal action by UK government
- Moderna Chief Medical Officer admits you could still transmit the Covid-19, even if vaccinated.
- Comments on Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine roll-out read like bot-generated advertising
- Covid vaccine: Facebook to ban anti-vaxx conspiracy theories
- Welsh Government Says People Will Get ID Cards To Prove They've Been Vaccinated
- Covid: Vaccination will be required to fly, says Qantas chief
- “Would you be willing to get a Covid vaccine in exchange for a $1,500 stimulus check?”
- Landmark legal ruling finds that Covid tests are not fit for purpose.
- Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost Nine of Ten COVID-19 Deaths
- Covid vaccine: How will we keep it cold enough?
- Head of Pfizer Research: Covid Vaccine is Female Sterilization
- Americans who've survived Covid-19 are now being denied life insurance.
- Xi Jinping may be facing an uphill battle in convincing the world to use a barcoded tracking
- We’re facing something much darker than a virus. 1 in 4 young adults are suicidal.
- Deep Breathing Could Help You Recover From Covid-19
- Look into my eyes, baby
"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." - G.Orwell
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250 million people participate in countrywide strike in India
Despite police repression and the COVID-19 pandemic, workers and farmers and their allies across India participated in a pan-India strike action against the recent neoliberal reforms pushed through by the Narendra Modi government.
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Are Americans Rational? - by Dmitry Orlov
"This defeat has multiple elements. First, the shale oil gamble is over. Drilling rates have collapsed, many shale oil companies are bankrupt, and US oil production is set to plummet from over 12 million barrels per day at its peak to around 5 million by next June. After that point the US will once again become a major oil importer, and since no other swing producers are available this will drive up oil prices, perhaps beyond the previous all-time record of $150/barrel, resulting in a US oil import bill of half a trillion dollars a year. But it is doubtful whether that much extra oil can be produced at almost any price."
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Come on, Mike! I'm losing control! - Art by Chinese "keyboard warrior" "乌合麒麟 Wuheqilin"
Some more of the artists controversial pieces:
After the Australian officials "demanded China to apologise for posting 'repugnant' fake image" and the entire western media completely ignored the very real report on atrocious Australian military war crimes in Afghanistan, the Chinese social media reacted with the following image:
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Political power and renewable energy futures: A critical review (sciencedirect)
We theorize connections between energy systems and democractic political power.
Renewable energy opens opportunities for democratic energy development.
Tensions for energy democracy concern governance, technologies and competing agendas. Attention is needed regarding how and for whom new energy soures are concentrated.
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The week in review, focus on Corona and the Great Reset
Signal or Noise? Comedy or Reality? Relax, decide to have fun and then decide yourself:
- It’s all about priorities (reddit)
- How Operation Warp Speed's Big Vaccine Contracts Could Stay Secret (NPR)
- Covid-19 passports trump travel bubbles, but digital security and test efficacy concerns must be addressed (SCMP)
- As a doctor, people ask me if it’s safe to take a new Covid vaccine. Given that criticism is risky, here’s my very careful answer (RT)
- Johns Hopkins Study Saying COVID-19 Has 'Relatively No Effect on Deaths' in U.S. Deleted After Publication
- Corona-Impfstoffe: Gigantisches Tappen im Dunkeln? (Telepolis)
- Zahlen des RKI sind "nichts wert" (ZDF)
- Kinderärzte: Plädoyer für offene Schulen (BR)
- RKI Chef Wieler über den CoVid Impfstoff (youtube)
- Bis zu 1000 Kieler sollen Corona-Warn-Armband testen (Welt)
- Bill Gates backs $1bn plan to cover earth in video surveillance satellites (telegraph)
- If the ‘Great Reset’ really is so good for us, let’s hold a referendum on it, so it can have a democratic mandate (or not) (RT)
- Klaus Schwab and his great fascist reset (winteroak)
- SOCOM and US Air Force Enlist Primer to Combat Disinformation (prnewswire)
- US, UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War On Independent Media (Zerohegde)
- Biometric Health Passports And The Panopticon (youtube)
- AADHAR, Gates, Sunak (twitter)
- "A Horrifying Future" - WEF's Vision For A Post-COVID World (zerohedge) (WEF docu PDF)
- It’s all about priorities (reddit)
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Against Method - Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge - by Paul Feyerabend
"Neither science nor rationality are universal measures of excellence. They are particular traditions, unaware of their historical grounding."
"My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. - Paul Feyerabend, p.24, Against Method
Paul Feyerabend Interview (1993)
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Writing Manifestos is fun. Here is one:
- Replace Economics with Ecology.
- Replace Money with Earthworms.
- Replace Accounting with Composting.
- Replace Growth with Relaxation.
- Replace Politics with Random Choice.
- Replace Experts with Children.
- Separate Science and State.
But in the end, it is much easier to write manifestos, than to exercise the art of peace every day.
- Replace Economics with Ecology.
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“Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.” ― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control & Communication in the Animal & Machine
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Week in Review, focus on Corona
Coronavirus: China calls for global QR code system to track international travel amid pandemic (independent.co.uk)
Xi Jinping wants ‘smooth functioning’ world economy but rights expert warns of surveillance
Could this COVID-19 ‘health passport’ be the future of travel and events? (WEF)
Rising COVID-19 infection rates pose a threat to global tourism. A new app acts as a health passport for travellers who are virus-free. Using blockchain technology, it provides an encrypted record of test results. Its creators say it could allow healthy travellers to avoid quarantine. The app could also allow sports and entertainment venues to reopen safely, as well as the global conference and exhibition industry.
Ethiopia’s military chief calls WHO head Tedros a criminal supporting a rebel region (WP)
In a televised address Wednesday night, Ethiopia’s army chief of staff, Gen. Berhanu Jula, called Tedros a criminal and said he should step down from his position as director general of the WHO for seeking to procure weapons for the Tigray region, where the Ethiopian military is fighting local forces.
Vaccine Safety to Remain Unclear Until Millions Get Their Shots (Bloomberg)
Some worry federal safety monitoring isn’t well coordinated. CDC safety expert says wide amount of date to be watched.
Vaccine rumours debunked: Microchips, 'altered DNA' and more (BBC)
"Injecting RNA into a person doesn't do anything to the DNA of a human cell," said Prof Jeffrey Almond of Oxford University. Pfizer spokesperson Andrew Widger said the company's vaccine "does not alter the DNA sequence of a human body. It only presents the body with the instructions to build immunity". It is true that no mRNA vaccine has been approved before, but multiple studies of mRNA vaccines in humans have taken place over the last few years.
#Comment: 🤪 rumours🤪 debunked 🤪 no 🤪 questions 🤪 left 🤪 LOL!! 🤪
TikTokers are pretending to have horrible side-effects from COVID-19 vaccines. The posts are jokey, but medical experts say they can encourage real anti-vaxx views. (BI)
A series of videos on TikTok show creators play-acting as patients who get sinister side-effects after taking a COVID-19 vaccine. The videos are part of the "point of view" trend. Many are clearly fictional, but some dabble in widespread conspiracy theories.
Bill Gates, the Virus and the Quest to Vaccinate the World (Billionaire Propaganda - by nytimes)
New DNA-Based Tagging System Could Replace Barcodes (interestingengineering)
University of Washington researchers teamed up with Microsoft to create the new system that could even revolutionize voting.
"To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will be given a letter, card, or document they can show to people as they move around."
This video provides one of the most erudite and informative looks at Covid-19 and the consequences of lockdowns. As AIER notes, it was remarkable this week to watch as it appeared on YouTube and was forcibly taken down only 2 hours after posting.
Top Pathologist Claims COVID-19 Is "The Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated On An Unsuspecting Public" (zerohedge)
Top pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson told government officials in Alberta during a zoom conference call that the current coronavirus crisis is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”
German police arrests lockdown critic Dr. Andreas Noack in a shocking video
Reports from Germany indicate that a German doctor, Dr. Andreas Noack was arrested during a police raid while he was recording a live video.
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Week in Review, focus on Politics and Economics
First, it was a "technical issue" in Europe which back on July 1 caused European stock markets to suffer a 3 hour outage. Then, in August, New Zealand’s stock market was forced to halt trading over four days in August after distributed-denial-of-service attacks overwhelmed its website. Then on October 1, another "technical issue" hit the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which resulted in an unprecedented all-day trading halt. And just a few weeks later, in late October, trading in all stocks and derivatives on Euronext NV markets was shut down for three hours affecting activity in countries including France and Belgium. The problem was traced to due to a software issue. Now, about a month later, the "glitching" rolling market blackout struck again, this time in Australia whose stock exchange opened for less than half an hour before a software issue forced it to close for the rest of Monday’s session, just as the country rolled out an "updated" trading system.
A Chinese defense contractor recently test-launched a swarm of loitering munitions from a light tactical vehicle, and there's a video of the system in action. Loitering munitions, more commonly known as suicide drones, fill a capability gap between cruise missiles and traditional fixed-wing combat drones by lingering over the battlefield. China is not alone in exploring swarm drone capabilities, but it has made significant strides in recent years.
Dragon flies, eagle crashes at geoeconomic summits - by Pepe Escobar
XI made his case for multilateralism, international cooperation and Global South representation while Trump was absent or golfing
Macron Accuses Russia, Turkey of Promoting Anti-French Sentiment in Africa
President Emmanuel Macron accused Russia and Turkey of seeking to promote anti-French sentiment in Africa by funding people who whip up resentment against France in the media, in an interview published Friday. "We must not be naive on this subject: many of those who speak, who make videos, who are present in the French-speaking media are funded by Russia or Turkey," he told Jeune Afrique magazine, accusing Moscow and Ankara of trying "to play on post-colonial resentment." 🤪🤪🤪
An heiress, a judge and a job: France's Sarkozy goes on trial for corruption
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy goes on trial on Monday accused of trying to bribe a judge and of influence-peddling, one of several criminal investigations that threaten to cast an ignominious pall over his decades-long political career.
Mexico says it wants its ex-officials tried in Mexico
Mexico’s foreign secretary said Thursday the country no longer wants officials accused of corruption to be put on trial in the United States, a move that could scale back a tradition that saw most of Mexico’s corruption cases tried north of the border.
Mexico Threatened All U.S. Cooperation Over General’s Arrest
Mexico threatened to cut cooperation with the U.S. after the surprise arrest of its former defense minister in Los Angeles, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Thursday. The U.S. violated a 1992 pact that all investigations on Mexican soil must be shared with the Latin American nation, Ebrard said at a press conference alongside President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. “There are two paths. Either this violation of the accord that exists between us is repaired, or we put all cooperation off the table,” Ebrard said. “We just want mutual respect,” Lopez Obrador added.
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Obey
"That [we] do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." — Aldous Huxley
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