[BLOOMBERG] After his militias and national guardsmen attacked aid caravans trying to feed his starving citizens, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro Venezuela's attempt at producing a Muammar Qadaffy... appeared on state television ... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
over the weekend dancing the salsa. The dictator’s point was clear: I’m not rattled. I’m not going anywhere.
This is the context for U.S. Senator Marco Rubio The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida... ’s cryptic counterprogramming on Twitter. On Sunday he tweeted before and after photos of the late Muammar Al Qadaffy of Libya. In the first he was smiling in sunglasses; in the second he was bloodied and fleeing a mob. Six hours later, Rubio tweeted a similar side-by-side of the late Nicolae Ceausescu ...late Communist dictator of Romania, where he was executed by a firing squad organized by his indignant subjects. While he was alive Old Nick was the subject of periodic mandatory adoring rallies and was respected in Washington because he wasn't Like All the Other Commies... of Romania, first giving an angry speech and then facing a firing squad.
The reaction was fierce. Some Twitter users began a campaign to report Rubio’s account for encouraging violence. Other activists began an online petition urging his resignation. Venezuela’s foreign minister told Democracy Now he was appalled.
For the Latin American left, Rubio’s tweets play into America’s Cold War history of supporting strong men and encouraging coups. The most infamous moment came on Sept. 11, 1973, when Chilean military officers ‐ at the urging of the CIA ‐ toppled President Salvador Allende, who was shot during the coup. (It’s disputed whether he took his own life.) The left watches what’s happening now in Venezuela and sees the American gringos up to their old tricks.
But this analysis crumbles under even the mildest scrutiny. Venezuela in 2019 is nothing like Chile in 1973. Allende won a real election in 1970. Maduro prevailed in a fake one last year. Maduro’s opposition is not a junta of military generals storming the presidential palace. It is the National Assembly, the country’s only institution with any democratic legitimacy. In short: In Chile in 1973, coup plotters sought to nullify an election; in Venezuela today, opposition leaders are seeking a new one.
Most important, at least from the perspective of the U.S., there is no comprehensive military intervention in the offing. It’s true that President Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... has asked his advisers about the feasibility of an intervention. It’s also true that senior administration officials like to say "all options" remain on the table; if Maduro sends his thugs to attack the U.S. embassy, for example, there will be a military response.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/27/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
The gold standard of dictators - as long as he's alive time is on his side.
[NationalReview] Read recent essays on China. Visit think-tank public symposia. Hear out military analysts. Talk with academics and media pundits. Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television.
The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. If one excises the word "Trump," what follows is a seemingly revolutionary recalibration of attitudes toward China that more or less echo Trump’s voice in the wilderness and often crude and shrill warnings dating back from the campaign trail of 2015.
Trump’s second secretary of state, the skillful Mike Pompeo, has been institutionalizing the president’s pessimistic view of China. Insightful but heretofore underappreciated assessments from China scholars such as Miles Yu and Gordon Chang are now being taking seriously. Both have been warning us for years that the Chinese seek domination, not accommodation, and are replacing their erstwhile feigned respect for our strength with an emboldened contempt for our perceived growing weakness, whether real or psychological. Both have warned also that once China achieves military, economic, and cultural parity with the United States, the global order will be quite different from that of the last 75 years.
From the military, one hears more frequently now that we were at a tipping point by late 2016: The Obama Asian pivot had failed ‐ publicly provocative, but in reality without substance, giving the lethal impression of real weakness masked by empty rhetoric. The Chinese militarization of the Spratley Islands was conceded as the inevitable future of the South China Sea. Chinese military and weapons doctrine was aimed at destroying the offensive capability of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific as a way of breaking off allies from America, and then Finlanding them.
From 2009 to 2016, our defense readiness was eroding, China’s increasing. Psychologically, the American military could not reassure the global order that China would not one day soon unleash North Korea, absorb Taiwan, emasculate South Korea and Japan, or isolate the Philippines and Australia. Huge and mercantile Chinese trade surpluses with all its Western trading partners were accepted as normal.
The cash-short Pentagon seemed to shrug that America was the victim of cosmic and historic forces that inevitably would dethrone the United States, analogous to the declinism of the 1930s, when a powerful U.S. 7th Fleet was not able to deter a modern rising Japanese navy from carving out what would become the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere based on perceptions of American impotence and weariness and spent European colonialism.
In Silicon Valley, the good old news of making trillions of dollars over the last 30 years in outsourcing assemblage to China, opening up a huge new Chinese consumer market, and entering joint partnerships has insidiously been eclipsed by the growing reality that our techie masters of the universe were instead deluded Dr. Frankensteins who had helped to birth an unstoppable monster.
...The idea seemed to be that if a few thousand multimillionaires got even far more fabulously rich by acquiescing to Chinese mercantilism, they could not do real harm to the vast and powerful U.S. Or perhaps, given inevitable American decline, the idea was that they should get their profits in now, before the American golden goose was put out of its misery.
In all these areas and more, a new consensus, among left and right, is now settling in that we are at a crossroads with China. Any more appeasement and acquiescence will lose the West its Asian allies, who will be forced to go with the ascendant superpower, not the declining one.
Either the U.S. military recalibrates or it will return to its 1930s stature of a powerful but vastly overextended Pacific navy and air force. We have reached a cultural nexus at which any more acquiescence would institutionalize the idea that to object to Chinese piracy is to indulge in hurtful stereotypes and therefore should be replaced with appeasement, and that giving away American technology or allowing its expropriation with a wink and nod is not treasonous but simply good business.
The establishment would like to fool itself that it came to its growing about-face on China thanks to a natural exhaustion of patience, or new data, or brilliant new exegeses. And that evolution may be in part true.
But far more likely, Trump’s early and relentless hammering on Chinese mercantilism, systematic cheating, and illiberality finally made the old status quo unsustainable in the face of mounting evidence.
The establishment is adopting Trump’s once-renegade stance toward China, and yet trying to immunize it from him all the same. So the end result seems something like the following: “That idiot Trump somehow now agrees with us on confronting China.”
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/27/2019 00:00 ||
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[8 views]
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#1
From 2009 to 2016, our defense readiness was eroding,
#8
The PRC has many great weaknesses that, if they get worse, will result in financial difficulty &/or civil unrest in China. "Military, economic and cultural parity with the United States" may wind up meaning something hyugely different from what the "best and brightest" are currently cogitating and constipating about.
[American Thinker] PwC Consulting forecasts that artificial intelligence’s contribution to world gross domestic product will jump from $2 trillion in 2018 to $15.7 trillion by 2030.
The first artificial intelligence (AI) patents were issued in the 1950s for machine learning and grew steadily to 19,000 by 2013. But the total number of AI patents almost tripled over the last five years to over 55,600.
This does not include another 256,456 worldwide patent publications for AI functional applications for biometrics, computer vision, natural language, information extraction, character recognition, scene understanding, and semantics.
The latest World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that two United States companies lead the world in issued AI patents; with IBM holding 8,290 patents and Microsoft holding about 5,930 patents. But China has become the fastest growing competitor by focusing on machine learning techniques of bio-inspired approaches, which draw from observations to develop vector machines and supervised learning.
#2
Like blockchain it will contribute nothing. And the pundits will be surprised but will blame it on whitey.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/27/2019 8:12 Comments ||
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#3
Sounds like someone gonna pay a lot of 'sclarole to mine and analyze your personal data.
Posted by: regular joe ||
02/27/2019 13:39 Comments ||
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#4
Artificial is the only kind of Intelligence Democrats like Alexandia Occasional Cortex can hope for
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/27/2019 15:15 Comments ||
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#5
there are a number of things that AI can do that humans do not do well, for example, continuously modulate the output of devices that improve human hearing, regulate human heartbeat, etc.
these have been and will continual to be gradually introduced
it is likely that a major improvement in automobile and truck AI will constitute over a Trillion by 2030
btw. current world GDP is estimated at about $80T with the US having a GDP of about $ 20T China about $15T and Japan about $5T
Posted by: lord garth ||
02/27/2019 19:41 Comments ||
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.[The Federalist] New York’s law legalizing abortion after a child’s gestational age of 24 weeks was caught in the crosshairs of President Trump’s state of the union address a few weeks ago. "Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth," said the president.
Dozens of news outlets rushed to quibble with his words. An NBC "fact check" labeled the statement false. The law allows abortions "after 24 weeks if the fetus is not viable or when it’s necessary to protect the life of the mother," the fact-checker reported.
Defenders of this law and those like it say it is moderate and compassionate, concerned only with making sure women with life-threatening pregnancy complications are not left to die. But if one looks at the medical and legal context for the law and understands what exactly the terms mean, it becomes clear that the reality is much less straightforward‐and much darker
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Venezuela's attempt at producing a Muammar Qadaffy...
The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida...
[American Thinker] PwC Consulting forecasts that artificial intelligence’s contribution to world gross domestic product will jump from $2 trillion in 2018 to $15.7 trillion by 2030.
