Wretchard.com

Foreign intervention without military force.

Some analysts think that the two heavyweight countries might be coming to some kind of deal over Maduro’s potential departure.
”(There’s) little doubt in my mind that the Russians and the U.S. have been talking for weeks about some kind of deal to ease Maduro out of office,” Timothy Ash, a senior emerging markets strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, said in a note Wednesday.
He said several factors led his to this conclusion — firstly, that Moscow had gained leverage to negotiate with the U.S. by sending military advisers to Caracas and, secondly, that President Trump had so far not signed off on new sanctions on Russia for its alleged use of a chemical weapon following the nerve agent poisoning of former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in the U.K. in 2018.

CNBC

Putin is on the ropes even if the US has so far not landed the knockout. Rubio is throwing the fence sitters off the rail by exposing the double crossers.

Maduro & Cubans know @MaikelMorenoTSJ was plotting against #MaduroRegime. Strong indications he will try to save himself by issuing an arrest warrant for @jguaido.

Marco Rubio on Twitter

Maduro says he investigating who was behind today’s military uprising. Won’t have to look very far. 4 of them were sitting with him at the conference table when he said that.

Marco Rubio on Twitter

The Venezuela issue is making it impossible for the Left to hide in ambiguous positions. Forced to choose they choose.

Today a classmate died. He was funny, brave and incredibly successful. It was a sobering moment to realize that the world outside didn’t stop and a memento mori for ‘if the heavens do not stop for princes they will not stop for me’.

Simone de Beauvoir, I remember reading somewhere, felt the same realization on hearing of Camus’ death. The sun would rise in Paris and the cars would rumble down the boulevards and there would be no Albert Camus.

But she had got in reverse. The hope lay precisely in that the sun still rose and people went to work as usual. Imagine what would happen if the world did stop when a prince or pauper died?

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote: ‘Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.’ Yet that is false. All true stories, if continued far enough, continue.

The tale continues in the children, in what we have or have not done. We become part of the blockchain. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Bring on the dawn, bring on the traffic. We are remembered in it.

A couple of years ago I started noticing elderly Chinese or Asians going around Sydney’s upper North Shore with prams or supermarket trolleys filled with cans or plastic bottles. Having been a scavenger in Tondo one time in my life I recognized exactly what they were doing.

These old Chinese folks were going around segregating trash so they could sell them for their return value, amounting to maybe $20 for a day’s work. To a Tondo scavenger first world garbage is essentially gold. We used to come back with mostly paper, rags, some bottles and cans.

The paper, cans, bottles and wires got segregated at the scavenger warehouse. Long fiber paper was “Waste 1”. Short fiber was “Waste 2”. Bottles were crushed and cans pounded flat and sold to the paper mills, glass factories and steel mills.

If a Tondo scavenger saw first world trash he’d be goldstruck. The Chinese immigrants to Australia can afford houses, cars, electronics. But they are not beneath working for $20 extra bucks by scavenging through garbage. This is why China is so admirable and terrifying.

Or must it “take a stand”?

I watched Dorsey’s ted appearance on my computer at home … Listening to him speak at ted felt like witnessing the end of something: the end of the techno-utopian period when social-media architects could speak eagerly about democracy and openness, without also mentioning the potential for enabling authoritarianism. …

This Tuesday, a week after Dorsey’s appearance at ted, Twitter released its first-quarter earnings report. It announced that, in the past year, the number of monetizable daily active users had increased by eleven per cent; there are now a hundred and thirty-four million active users on the platform. At the news, the company’s stock soared. That afternoon, Dorsey swapped his hoodie for a suit, removed his beanie, and sat down for a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump, who, earlier that morning, had tweeted that the platform was “Very discriminatory” against Republicans. According to the Washington Post, the President’s primary concern in the meeting was his follower count. Dorsey also took the time that day to call Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, to discuss a tweet by Trump, sent earlier this month, that combined footage of the Twin Towers on September 11th with out-of-context excerpts from a speech Omar recently delivered on Islamophobia. After the tweet posted, Omar received a host of death threats; Twitter did not intervene. Dorsey explained to Omar that the President’s tweet had not violated his company’s rules.

New Yorker

What the media want is a man in the loop, because there was always a man in the media loop. The alternative to human intervention is a ruthless competition of memes, some of which may spread at the expense of the host.

However there is a technical solution to making memetic competition fairer and that increase trust of issuance; that is to make sure institutions cannot create facts or tokens of value from nothing.

Twitter cannot prevent the media or trolls from creating facts from nothing. The two most common ways to “print facts” are to quote secret sources (unidentified informant) or to argue from victimhood or virtue.

These are the media’s (and social media’s) engine of creation. Trump tweets something; Steele releases a dossier; the NYT publishes an unbylined editorial. Greta Thurnberg worries about climate change. And presto a meme is born.

Can Jack Dorsey fix this? No. But he could for example implement code so we can go back to the Tweet Zero of anything. This would make it possible for readers to reward or punish truth or falsehood. It won’t solve everything but it’s a start.

Each new Twitter user could get a startup sum of tokens. To tweet he must use up some of his tokens, which are either replenished or consensus fined by Tweeters, of course expending tokens. Solving the problem of junk info is like solving spam.You can’t have a competition of memes without a market.

And welcome to Wolfenstein.

After the USSR fell its strategists decided its best offense against the West consisted of disinformation.

The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. The book has had a large influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites and it has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. Its publication in 1997 was well-received in Russia and powerful Russian political figures subsequently took an interest in Dugin, a Russian fascist and nationalist who has developed a close relationship with Russia’s Academy of the General Staff. …

The book declares that “the battle for the world rule of Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution“. The Eurasian Empire will be constructed “on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.”
Military operations play relatively little role. The textbook believes in a sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services. The operations should be assisted by a tough, hard-headed utilization of Russia’s gas, oil, and natural resources to bully and pressure other countries.^[
The book states that “the maximum task [of the future] is the ‘Finlandization‘ of all of Europe”.

Wikipedia

That disinformation effort is now manifest not just in the US but in Europe, perhaps especially in the EU.

In just a month, regular elections to the European Parliament will be held, the outcome of which might lead to an increase in the role of the Kremlin in Europe, revision of anti-Russian sanctions, and weakening of the pro-Ukrainian lobby. …

The report of Mikk Marran, Estonian Director of Foreign Intelligence, says that the Kremlin clearly intends to split the European Parliament, make Europeans doubt the importance of this institution, discredit sanctions as a method of “retaliation against Russia.” The Russians cannot work out in the open like it was a few years ago, the EU special services warn. They would change tactics and strategy to camouflage their actions. And a number of gaps in European security, to which experts draw attention, will play into their hands.
Thus, Estonian politician Tunne Kelam assures that Europe has not realized the reality of the Russian threat. The Kremlin managed to put down the vigilance of the Europeans, constantly changing their tactics. “The strength of Russia’s approach is that it doesn’t use the same tools everywhere. Instead, its tools differ depending on the country it is targeting. What the Kremlin does in, say Greece, is different to what it does in Ireland, but all of these activities are still part of the same tool kit,” Foxall, from the Henry Jackson Society, said in a commentary for CNBC.

112 International

There are indications that a new generation of American counter-tactics have emerged, perhaps starting in the closing years of the Obama administration but certainly during Trump’s tenure. It is marked by the use of sanctions, proxy warfare and undermining or attracting Putin’s most vulnerable clients in North Korea, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba.

Unlike the Russians there is no popularly read Master Plan for American grand strategy unless one counts Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard which advocates a balance of power act on the Eurasian continent.

The obvious weakness of Dugin’s strategy is its complete reliance on external offensive operations. There is no internal reform program aimed at improving Russia’s efficiency and economic dynamism. Like the Czars the modern rulers of the Kremlin think Russia can be a great power while remaining economically backward.

By contrast the greatest innovation of Trump is his emphasis on renewing American competitiveness. In contrast to Dugin, Trump’s strategy is largely internal — and it has to be. While Russia appears to rely on disinformation, Trump is relying on America cornering all the emerging technologies of the 21st century.

Trump vs Dugin. It’s an interesting geostrategic matchup. But it would be a mistake to think the fight is solely between Russia and the USA. The big rival is China and it’s interesting how this giant adversary has some kind of stealth coating which reflects less than Russian collusion.

While Russia can only aspire to penetrate the network China aims to actually be the network, to dominate the physical layer and technologies like artificial intelligence, which makes it potentially far more dangerous than the Kremlin.

Despite a senior U.S. cybersecurity official warning that “Britain will harm economic and military co-operation between the countries if it uses Huawei for its next-generation 5G mobile network,” and the last-minute leaking of CIA warnings that had been given to the U.K. government alleging that Huawei had been funded by branches of China’s military and intelligence, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has decided that Huawei will not be excluded from the U.K.’s 5G network build-out, albeit with restrictions.

Forbes

Unlike Russia, China has an internal strategy unmatched perhaps even by the United States. Beijing has a plan to become the dominant economy and technology powerhouse on the planet. Listening to Bernie Sanders and even Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama one wonders whether anyone in the political leadership of American liberalism is willing or even able to take on the Chinese or Russians on the strategic level.

They seem almost senile, concerned with appearances, attached to fads, puttering around in the most curious manner. What occupies them is victimhood, sexual politics, climate engineering and virtue signalling, which would be alright in an institution but suicidal on the stage of hard-edged power politics.

They say they are the “only adults in the room” yet the more you look the less you find.

It’s perfectly rational to say “Trump’s strategy is wrong” for it well may be. But it is incumbent on the political system to craft a better one of their own, one which goes beyond soundbites and talking points.

The objection to this critique is that Sanders’ et al are ‘secretly sophisticated’; that they are in possession of special classified knowledge that the public lack and therefore policies like Open Borders make analytic sense in the nuanced universe. But this is unlikely.

The lesson of the last few decades is that the Western political elites are not much smarter and often a good deal less intelligent than the first 10,000 names in the telephone directory.

Our transient certitudes. Tomorrow is a dead cert, until it actually arrives.

Sri Lanka’s President has demanded the resignation of two top security officials after the Easter Sunday terrorr attack after it emerged key intelligence on attack targeting churches was withheld from ministers.

The perpetrators were educated in the UK and Australia. The question asks itself. What role did trendy Western fads play in unleashing this ISIS plague on the world?

Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene described the bombers as middle to upper class men whose families were financially stable and said many of them held degrees.
Some of them had studied abroad, with at least one gaining a bachelor’s degree in the UK before going to Australia for post-graduate studies, then settling in Sri Lanka, he said.
The group were united in their belief that Islam should be the only religion in Sri Lanka, and that was what motivated their attack on Sunday.

Daily Mail

The New Zealand PM said there was connection between the NZ mosque attacks and the Sri Lankan church bombings despite reports to the contrary.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Wednesday that her government was not aware of any intelligence suggesting that a devastating attack on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka was in retaliation for deadly shootings on a mosques in Christchurch.

Sri Lanka’s junior minister for defence, Ruwan Wijewardene, told parliament on Tuesday that an initial investigation had revealed the bombings on churches and hotels, which killed 321 people, had been carried out in revenge for deadly shootings in two New Zealand mosques on March 15.

Reuters

But is that really so? The narrative all but proclaimed “we did it … we are guilty” even though the mosque perp was neither Kiwi nor Christian. Having admitted the sin was it not reasonable to expect someone would administer the penance upon the most defenseless?

As Marx said “every giant … presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine”. So then does every virtue signal presuppose a designated sinner. Virtue signaling is really another way of saying “blame them … blame them”.

This is why the Western virtuous wore hijabs, partly in solidarity but partly to say “I am not as these sinners”, meaning not the perp but what the virtuous believed the perp represented. Maybe Gaia forgives but ISIS does not.

We are getting a glimpse of hybrid warfare, American style

For the first time, the United States government is offering a multi-million dollar reward for those who provide accurate information about the finances and activities of the Hezbollah terrorist group; a tempting offer for some Venezuelans with classified information.
The amount offered by the State Department is up to USD $10 million for information that helps interrupt Hezbollah financing anywhere in the world. The Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said that Hezbollah has active cells in Venezuela and South America.

Panama Post

NEARLY THREE YEARS after the mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers began disemboweling the NSA’s hackers and leaking their hacking tools onto the open web, Iran’s hackers are getting their own taste of that unnerving experience. For the last month, a mystery person or group has been targeting a top Iranian hacker team, dumping their secret data, tools, and even identities onto a public Telegram channel—and the leak shows no signs of stopping.
Since March 25, a Telegram channel called Read My Lips or Lab Dookhtegan—which translates from Farsi as “sewn lips”—has been systematically spilling the secrets of a hacker group known as APT34 or OilRig, which researchers have long believed to be working in service of the Iranian government. So far, the leaker or leakers have published a collection of the hackers’ tools, evidence of their intrusion points for 66 victim organizations across the world, the IP addresses of servers used by Iranian intelligence, and even the identities and photographs of alleged hackers working with the OilRig group.

Wired

The CIA thought the USSR would overtake the US as the world’s largest economy in 1992. The article tries to understand how such a tremendous intelligence failure could take place. Part of the reason was because the wrong estimates were ‘secret knowlege’ and therefore they must be true. It was secret baloney. Errors do not become truth by classifying them.

Secrecy: the American Experience

To be fair there was a lot of unclassified baloney as well. According to the predictions of 1970 Earth Day the world should have ended by now. Unlike classified baloney this sort of error derives its authority from virtue. We believe it not because it is secret but because it sounds high minded. However it can be wrong just the same.

Intelligence failures have not stopped. The world institutions want to forget how ISIS rose because it was yet another case where they didn’t — or wouldn’t — see it coming.
Watch the video. The scale of destruction. The multitudes of victims. It was quite a show and a reminder that “won’t see” has the same effect as “cannot see”.

We all move on because what else can you do but shamble toward our new certainties, secret forecasts, virtuous predictions. But the future is uncertain, full of marvels and terrors unforeseen but nobody wants to tell you that.

The irony in the story that the Sri Lanka church attacks were a retaliation for NZ is the New Zealand attacker was neither a Christian nor a New Zealander. The ‘Easter Worshippers’ are just a designated target.

So what happens? The New Zealanders get their guns confiscated and the Sri Lankan Christians are bombed. Yet somehow this is supposed to make sense.

Sri Lanka minister says initial investigation shows Easter Sunday bombings were in retaliation for New Zealand mosque attack … two domestic Islamist organizations, including National Thawheed Jama’ut, are responsible for the attacks

Reuters

The NZ killer said of himself:

The country he feels he has the “closest political and social values” to is China.
When it comes to religion, he says that whether he is a Christian “is complicated”.

Sky News

Since 2014, NATO strategists have focused much of their attention on a forty-mile-wide stretch of border between Poland and Lithuania called the Suwalki Gap (pronounced ‘Soo-vow-kee’). The gap’s two highways are the only land corridor by which NATO troops could reinforce its Baltic member states in event of a conflict with Russia. …
To the west of the Gap is the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which hosts over 15,000 Russian troops and bristles with heavy artillery and long-range ballistic and anti-aircraft missiles.
To the east of the gap is the authoritarian state of Belarus, which is nominally allied with Russia despite increasing tensions between its long-term dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Moscow. Russian forces are already deployed in Belarus and have been accorded passage from there to Kaliningrad. However, Belarus’s cooperation with Russia in a conflict with NATO is not guaranteed.
Thus the “gap” is a natural chokepoint Russia could potentially assail from multiple directions to pinch off columns of NATO troops attempting to reinforce the Baltics.

Yahoo

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/media/report_images/Suwalki.jpg_org

Poland’s government is interested in establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in their country and they’re willing to pay for it.
The Polish defense ministry said there is a “clear and present need for a permanent U.S. armored division deployed in Poland,” and is willing to provide financial backing to host the soldiers that could reach $2 billion, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by Polish news outlet Onet.

Army Times

“Secularism” is on the decline in the West too. It’s full of fanatics. Secularism requires not the absence of belief, but the absence of fanaticism. Odd that it should have reached its peak in the early 2000s when much that is now deemed anathema was prevalent.

“JAKARTA, Indonesia — The deadly attacks in Sri Lanka on Sunday highlighted how easily religious coexistence can be ripped apart in a region where secularism is weakening amid the growing appeal of a politics based on ethnic and sectarian identity.
In India, the country’s governing right-wing Hindu party is exploiting faith for votes, pushing an us-versus-them philosophy that has left Muslims fearing they will be lynched if they walk alone.
In Myanmar, the country’s Buddhist generals have orchestrated a terrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Rohingya Muslims.”

New York Times

If the investigation based on the Steele dossier represents a ‘coup attempt’ has it started a runaway train by provoking a backlash? Or is there some way of getting the locomotive back on track?

But they felt as an insurance policy that Donald Trump for a variety of reasons–culturally, politically, socially–was unacceptable as president. And the very thought that he could be president was so foreign and disruptive that they felt they had a higher duty, a higher loyalty to stop that. So what did they do? They started to surveil his campaign, and they put informants we know into his campaign.

Legal Insurrection

The locomotive may get back on track but the probability is it will be a different track. Things will settle, not in the old equilibrium but a new one.

The events since 2016 — Brexit, the new Cold War, the inability of Trump to become an ‘old consensus’ President — suggests the old world has hit a fork where the old code base diverges to produce different tracks.

The four possible outcomes of a fork based on competition are:

1. The death of the fork.
2. A re-merging of the fork
3. The death of the original branch
4. Successful branching, two systems emerge.

We are likely to be entering a period of competition both within countries and internationally. Trump’s plan to release illegal aliens into sanctuary cities is likely to be the opening salvo of differentiation.

Two systems, in fact n-systems can coexist provided there’s an interface that allows them to cooperate in nondestructive ways. We are likely to become members of subnational affinity groups separated from others by virtual walls.

We already know what that branching looks like. The homeless man and hipster live side by side in many Western cities. However they are separated by credentials. Ultimately all they will need is a palmprint or facial recognition.

Maybe the world belongs to not to those who stop dystopia but whoever can make a buck from it.

The solution to failing states is to fix them in situ. It’s not always compassionate to turn 3rd world doctors into taxidrivers. The open borders philosophy may designed for the elites more than the poor.

Across the region, governments are struggling to deal with the consequences of many of their most talented young people leaving and while many politicians in the region have played on fears of immigration to win support, research has shown that concern over emigration is more acute. 

An estimated 3.4 million Romanians left the country in the decade after EU accession, according to a study by Romanian business leaders, while the ministry of health estimates that 43,000 doctors departed during the period. A study by the US-based Population Reference Bureau, meanwhile, forecast Romania’s population will fall by 22% by 2050, the steepest projected global decline, due to a combination of emigration, high mortality and low birth rates. Neighbouring Bulgaria has a similarly worrying forecast.

Guardian

“It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?” the Democrat representative wondered aloud.

Bristol-based eco-activist Alice Brown, who was one of the first to sign up to BirthStrike, joined Pepino on the UK media circuit this week to talk about their concerns for the future and urge other British women to think twice before bringing children into the world.

Breitbart