Do We REALLY Have a Long Way to Go and a Short Time to Get There?

bbc |  At the start of the 2010s, one of the world leaders in AI, DeepMind, often referred to something called AGI, or "artificial general intelligence" being developed at some point in the future. 

Machines that possess AGI - widely thought of as the holy grail in AI - would be just as smart as humans across the board, it promised. 

DeepMind's lofty AGI ambitions caught the attention of Google, who paid around £400m for the London-based AI lab in 2014 when it had the following mission statement splashed across its website: "Solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else."

Several others started to talk about AGI becoming a reality, including Elon Musk's $1bn AI lab, OpenAI, and academics like MIT professor Max Tegmark. 

In 2014, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, went one step further with his book Superintelligence. It predicts a world where machines are firmly in control.

But those conversations were taken less and less seriously as the decade went on. At the end of 2019, the smartest computers could still only excel at a "narrow" selection of tasks. 

Gary Marcus, an AI researcher at New York University, said: "By the end of the decade there was a growing realisation that current techniques can only carry us so far."

He thinks the industry needs some "real innovation" to go further.

"There is a general feeling of plateau," said Verena Rieser, a professor in conversational AI at Edinburgh's Herriot Watt University. 

One AI researcher who wishes to remain anonymous said we're entering a period where we are especially sceptical about AGI. 

"The public perception of AI is increasingly dark: the public believes AI is a sinister technology," they said. 

For its part, DeepMind has a more optimistic view of AI's potential, suggesting that as yet "we're only just scratching the surface of what might be possible".

"As the community solves and discovers more, further challenging problems open up," explained Koray Kavukcuoglu, its vice president of research.

"This is why AI is a long-term scientific research journey.

"We believe AI will be one of the most powerful enabling technologies ever created - a single invention that could unlock solutions to thousands of problems. The next decade will see renewed efforts to generalise the capabilities of AI systems to help achieve that potential - both building on methods that have already been successful and researching how to build general-purpose AI that can tackle a wide range of tasks."

Human Supremacy - A New Political Axis of Man's Possible Development?

jacobin |  Populism involves the exclusion of elements from society not considered a part of the “people,” usually cultural “others” and the ambiguously defined “elites” or “anti-nationals.” A nationalist populist discourse, as in the Indian case, differentiates between who belongs to the nation and who does not. Hindutva’s “people” is imagined as a religious and ethno-cultural Hindu community which excludes Muslims and liberal elites.

In addition to delimiting the authentic “people,” this form of populism typically relies on a leader who claims to be the sole representative of the people and the embodiment and authority of the popular will. Modi is a paradigmatic example of such a leader.

At an event hosted by the Indian diaspora in Houston, the “Howdy Modi?” rally, Modi’s answer to the rhetorical question was revealing: “Modi is nothing by himself. I am only a common man working on the orders of 1.3 billion people. So, when you ask, ‘Howdy Modi?’ I can only answer, ‘everything in Bharat is good.’” Despite the pretensions of humility, Modi understands the populist logic well: to ask the question how is Modi is precisely to ask how is the nation.

Additionally, this form of populism is a political style which involves a whole repertoire of staged, mediatized performances by the leader that are transmitted to wider audiences through media. Part of the performative rhetoric of such populist leaders centers around some kind of a pervasive crisis or threat. With Modi and the BJP, there is ever present specter of “Urban-Naxals,” “terrorists,” “anti-nationals,” “Tukde-Tukde Gang,” and “Khan Market Gang,” all of whom are portrayed as trying to undermine the integrity of the nation, and in effect polluting the purity of the people.

These Are Novel Living Machines

telegraph | The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’

Dubbed ‘xenobots’ because they are constructed of biological material taken from the Xenopus laevis frog, the little bots are the first to be constructed from living cells.

Researchers are hopeful they could be programmed to move through arteries scraping away plaque, or swim through oceans removing toxic microplastic.

And because they are alive, they can replicate and repair themselves if damaged or torn.

“These are novel living machines,” said Dr Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, who co-led the new research.

“They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

Living organisms have often been manipulated by humans in the past, right down to their DNA code, but this is the first time that biological machines have been built completely from scratch.

Scientists first used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont to create an algorithm that assembled a few hundred virtual skin and heart cells into a myriad forms and body shapes, for specific tasks.

Based on the blueprints, a team of biologists from Tufts University, Massachusetts, then assembled the cells into living bots, just one millimetre wide. 

Stakes is High - So the DNC Lies, and Lies, and Lies....,

CNN |  The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president. 

The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters.

 

Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.

 

The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting. 

 

That evening, Sanders expressed frustration at what he saw as a growing focus among Democrats on identity politics, according to one of the people familiar with the conversation. Warren told Sanders she disagreed with his assessment that a woman could not win, three of the four sources said.

Sanders denied the characterization of the meeting in a statement to CNN. 

 

"It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win," Sanders said. "It's sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren't in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."

 

Warren's communications director Kristen Orthman declined to comment.

DNC Pissing Its Granny Pannies Over Truth and Popularity of the Bern...,

thehill |  Democrats who believe Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had a negative influence on the 2016 general election against President Trump are increasingly expressing worries he’ll hurt the party again in 2020. 

The Democrats complaining about Sanders, some of whom have histories with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, argue the rhetoric being employed by the Vermont senator in some cases goes too far in damaging his rivals. 

They say it will make it harder for the party to unify around a nominee, and they’re particularly worried that supporters of Sanders won’t back any nominee who isn’t their favored candidate.

“He needs to stop,” said one Democratic strategist, who is not affiliated with any of the presidential campaigns. “It's not helpful and it actually hurts the party. It’s like he didn't learn his lesson the last time. It’s incredibly short-sighted and terrible.”

This strategist pointed to the senator’s recent remarks in a Los Angeles Times editorial board meeting where he said that Trump would eat former Vice President Joe Biden’s lunch if he is the nominee. 

“Joe Biden is a personal friend of mine, so I’m not here to, you know, to attack him, but my God, if you are, if you’re a Donald Trump and got Biden having voted for the war in Iraq, Biden having voted for these terrible, in my view, trade agreements, Biden having voted for the bankruptcy bill. Trump will eat his lunch,” Sanders told the Times.

Biden isn't the only rival Democrat taking fire from Sanders, and it's not just those who worked on the Clinton campaign who are complaining about him....

... Sanders is rising in polls and increasingly is seen as a real contender in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — and for the general election. A new poll released Friday found Sanders with 20 percent support and Warren in second with 17 percent, just ahead of former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) with 16 percent and Biden with 15 percent.

Some of the Democratic angst about his rhetoric seems linked to the idea that he could actually win. 

Lottery Underway for One Hundred Doses of the Most Expensivist...,

thescientist |  SMA occurs from having two copies of a mutated version of the survival motor neuron 1 (SMN1) gene, which is responsible for the proteins that maintain neurons related to muscle movement. Without proper signals from the brain to move, muscles begin to atrophy and cause a host of related problems, such as decreased mobility and an inability to swallow. Many patients die by age two, and applicants for the lottery must be under two years old. The drug, given intravenously, provides the brain with a functional copy of SMN1 through a viral vector.

Pharmaceutical giant Novartis has begun accepting applications for a lottery-based program to give away 100 doses of a gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, a sometimes-deadly muscle-wasting disease that affects about 1 in 10,000 births. The initiative will provide access to children with SMA living in countries where the intervention, Zolgensma, has not yet been approved. But there are far more than 100 patients who could be eligible.

The company has cited production limitations as the reason for high treatment costs and limited doses for the lottery. An independent bioethics committee worked with Novartis to develop the terms of the lottery.

“It’s a difficult situation,” Ricardo Batista, the father of an infant with SMA who lives in Canada, tells The Globe And Mail. “It’s a lottery where we’re leaving children’s lives up to chance. I don’t think it’s a game that any of us want to play.”

Biologics Global Market Opportunities And Strategies To 2021

Shortly before I went on "hiatus" last year, I posted about the Nobel given for "directed evolution" and what I casually referred to as "Mubabs" - you know - all those newfangled biologic medicines that have become pervasive mainstays of broadcast and print advertising. I thought it was amusing just how many oddly named mubabs there were and began collecting the oddly named drugs and what they were prescribed for summer before last.

reportlinker  |  The biologics industry comprises companies manufacturing biological products that are derived from genetically modified proteins and human genes.Biologics products include a wide range of recombinant therapeutic proteins, vaccines, and monoclonal antibodies.

These products are isolated from natural sources such as human, animal, and microorganisms by biotechnological methods and other cutting-edge technologies.

Executive Summary
The global biologics market was worth $221 billion in 2017 and is essentially segmented into monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and vaccines. Biologics are very large complex molecules manufactured in a living system such as microorganisms, animal cells or plant cells. They are produced using the recombinant DNA technology and are composed of sugars, proteins, nucleic acids or a combination of these substances. In 2017, 12 biologics were approved in the USA, 10 in European Union and 7 in Japan. There are over 1000 biologics under development which will drive the biologics market in the future. Cancer is the therapeutic area with maximum number of biologics under development and Alzheimer’s has the least number.

Of the total biologics market across the globe, Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) accounted for a share of 43% in 2017 and was worth $94 billion. North America had the highest share in 2017 at $39.2 billion followed by Western Europe with a market value of $26.4 billion. Asia-Pacific was the third largest market with a share of 12% and a market value of $11.4 billion. mAbs are biological drugs that recognize and bind to a specific antigen that causes various chronic health conditions such as arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis. mAbs can be further segmented based on the presence of different amounts of murine (mouse or rat origin) sequences in the variable region. The segments consist of murine mAbs, chimeric mAbs, human and humanized mAbs. Of these, humanized mAbs accounted for 43% share in the monoclonal antibody market with a market value of $37.6 billion followed by human mAbs and chimeric mAbs at $32.9 billion and $18.8 billion respectively. Murine mAbs accounted only for 5% of the total mAbs market and was worth $4.7 billion in 2017.

Therapeutic proteins or recombinant proteins are engineered in the laboratory and works by targeting therapeutic process which compensates for the deficiency of an essential protein. Therapeutic proteins include cytokines, peptide hormones and enzymes. The market for therapeutic protein was worth $80 billion in 2017 accounting for a share of 36% of the global biologics market. North American market for therapeutic proteins was worth $33 billion in 2017 followed by Western Europe at $17.3 billion. The market in Asia Pacific was worth $11.3 billion and the markets in South America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa accounted only for 4%, 6%, 9% and 4% respectively. Based on the segmentation of therapeutic proteins into cytokines, peptide hormones and enzymes, peptide hormones accounted for 45% of the market followed by cytokines at 18% and enzymes at 10% share. Other blood factors also had a share of around 27% in the total therapeutic proteins market globally.

Eric Weinstein Explains The Replacement Negroe Program

ineteconomics |  Upcoming labor market shortages will devastate Science and Engineering.

This was a mantra heard through much of the 1980s.  And yet, the predicted “seller’s market” for talent never materialized as unemployment rates actually spiked for newly minted PhDs in technical fields. In fact, most US economists seemed to think that the very idea of labor market shortages hardly made sense in a market economy since wages could simply rise to attract more entrants.

In the late nineties, in the course of research into immigration, I became convinced that our US high skilled immigration policy simply did not add up intellectually. As I studied the situation, it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining power through labor market intervention and manipulation. 

Increasingly the research seemed to show that interventions by government, universities and industry in the US labor market for scientists, especially after the University system stopped growing organically in the early 1970s were exceedingly problematic. By 1998, it was becoming obvious that the real problems of high skilled immigration were actually rather well understood by an entire class of policy actors who were not forthcoming about the levers of policy they were using to influence policy. The NSF/NAS/GUIRR complex appeared to be feigning incompetence by issuing labor market studies that blatantly ignored wages and market dynamics and instead focused on demographics alone. 

During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall. 

The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies. 

The author turned out, again as predicted, not to be a demographer, but a highly competent Ph.D. in economics who was fully aware of the functioning of the wage mechanism. But, as the study makes clear, the problem being solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to US Ph.D.s with other options. The study’s aim was not to locate talent but to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s 

That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.

We Wuz BadMuhhukkahs Till We Got Hoodwinked, Bamboozled, Raped, and Pillaged Like Little Bishes..,.,

Full Paper

NAP |  The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined. The research enterprise holds great promise for advancing social, health, and economic goals into the next century.

The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined.

This hopeful vision for the U.S. academic research enterprise motivated the working group's deliberations and analyses. To achieve this vision, the enterprise must be guided wisely by current and future generations of investigators, university administrators, the sponsors of research, and the broader public. The working group's strong and positive presentation of this vision assumes that such guidance will prevail.

Dynamic change is a central component of this vision. The research enterprise of the future will be unlike the one of today. Significant opportunities and challenges can be expected in the decades ahead.

A GLOBAL RESEARCH SYSTEM

International research cooperation will become a pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next century. Multinational research arrangements will be essential for studying such phenomena as large-scale environmental effects and the most demanding experimental problems in the physical and biological sciences. The research communities of both industrialized and developing countries will rely more and more on cooperative ventures to address these and other research problems. Just as foreign-based companies now support research in U.S. universities, in the future more governments and industries are likely to support the research activities of other nations.

Over the next few decades, the number of nations with highly effective research systems will grow. Their university, government, and industry laboratories will collaborate in novel, imaginative, and effective ways. Global competition in science and technology will require that the United States pay close attention to the research activities of other countries, especially those targeting economic growth as their primary research goal. This will be particularly true for the Western European and Pacific Rim countries, which have become fierce competitors in the knowledge-intensive global marketplace. Several of the newly democratized nations of Eastern

International research cooperation will become a pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next century.

Epstein a Construct: One of His Functions - Funding Blue-Sky Science

Weinstein holding out on an Epstein podcast because of a creepy threatening dinner at which he was told not to put out what he thinks and knows?

Weinstein meets Epstein before Florida charges. Goes to Epstein's house where Epstein plainly signals that he's recording guests, Epstein meets Weinstein in a dining room where Epstein desecrates the flag,  Weinstein is not judgemental about consenting adults, though he believe Epstein is Humbert Humbert not living up to the requirements of his construct role.

Science people continued talking to Epstein after charges because he funded cowboy science disagreeable to the "woke" crowd. Science people knew that it wasn't Epstein funding them, but that it was "something else" funding them through the Epstein construct.  The Govt. stepped away from blue sky science in 1986 under Reagan.

The Govt underfunds science. So when the "rich guy" comes into the room, it matters. The NSF National Academy of Science under Eric Block and the Government and University Research Round Table conspired to destroy the bargaining power of scientists as laborers by implementing a replacement negroe program for science. The Reagan Govt. realized it could import scientists from China, Taiwan, South Korea and India. 

H1-B's and the 1990 Immigration Reform Act took China from 0-60 in half a second and launched our current great power nemesis. The Vannevar Bush Endless Frontier Agreement was abandoned in favor of importing cheap, foreign STEM workers. Asymmetric access to the labor market is fundamental right of citizenship argues Weinstein, and this fundamental right was stripped pursuant to capital interests in removing the privileged labor value of American STEM workers and replacing them with cheap, foreign STEM workers at a 100-1 ratio.

Vulture capitalism metastatically destroyed American fundamental science! Sam Harris makes some weak and trifling "free market" mouth noises, but realizes he's up against an informational rock and a hard place in Weinstein. Then the discussion veers back to creepy-assed Epstein and the holes he was filling....,

MIT and Jeffrey Epstein

MIT |  On January 10, 2020, the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, the Institute’s governing board, released the results of Goodwin Procter’s fact-finding regarding interactions between Jeffrey Epstein and the Institute. In September 2019, at the request of President L. Rafael Reif and the Executive Committee, MIT's General Counsel retained the firm to design and conduct the fact-finding process.

• View Goodwin Procter’s report
• View the Executive Committee's statement
• View President Reif's letter to the community
• View the MIT News article
• View frequently asked questions

The Message from Iran: "We Can Attack All Your Bases and You Can Do Nothing to Prevent That."

moonofalabama |  I was shocked that not one Iranian missile was intercepted. It appears CENTCOM did not even have a capability to intercept missiles at the Ayn al-Assad Air Base. That is military incompetence. A slew of officers should be relieved for that egregious incompetence including the CINC CENTCOM. No wonder the neocon wonder boys in the Pentagon and White House decided not to join the dance in the wee hours after the Iranian strike. Talk about scared straight.

No U.S. air or missile defense against the incoming projectiles was observed.

The message from Iran is thus: "We can attack all your bases and you can do nothing to prevent that."

The missile attack came despite Donald Trump's threats to Iran. It called his bluff.

Further reactions will depend on the U.S. reactions to the demand of the Iraqi parliament that all foreign forces leave Iraq. Should the U.S. leave Iraq peacefully all will be well. Should it insist on staying U.S. soldiers will die.

Patriot Missiles: Made in America - FAIL EVERYWHERE!!!

FP |  On March 25, Houthi forces in Yemen fired seven missiles at Riyadh. Saudi Arabia confirmed the launches and asserted that it successfully intercepted all seven. 

This wasn’t true. It’s not just that falling debris in Riyadh killed at least one person and sent two more to the hospital. There’s no evidence that Saudi Arabia intercepted any missiles at all. And that raises uncomfortable questions not just about the Saudis, but about the United States, which seems to have sold them — and its own public — a lemon of a missile defense system.

Social media images do appear to show that Saudi Patriot batteries firing interceptors. But what these videos show are not successes. One interceptor explodes catastrophically just after launch, while another makes a U-turn in midair and then comes screaming back at Riyadh, where it explodes on the ground.

It is possible, of course, that one of the other interceptors did the job, but I’m doubtful. That is because my colleagues at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and I closely examined two different missile attacks on Saudi Arabia from November and December 2017.

In both cases, we found that it is very unlikely the missiles were shot down, despite officials’ statements to the contrary. Our approach was simple: We mapped where the debris, including the missile airframe and warhead, fell and where the interceptors were located. In both cases, a clear pattern emerged. The missile itself falls in Riyadh, while the warhead separates and flies over the defense and lands near its target. One warhead fell within a few hundred meters of Terminal 5 at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. The second warhead, fired a few weeks later, nearly demolished a Honda dealership. In both cases, it was clear to us that, despite official Saudi claims, neither missile was shot down. I am not even sure that Saudi Arabia even tried to intercept the first missile in November.

The point is there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia has intercepted any Houthi missiles during the Yemen conflict. And that raises a disquieting thought: Is there any reason to think the Patriot system even works?

Did .45 Catch and Check Iraq's Creeping with China?

strategic-culture |  Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani’s assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi Arabia and China as well the U.S. dollar’s role as the global reserve currency.

The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani’s assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament. He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in 2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.

Here is the reconstruction of the story:

Deep Dive Into America's Contest With China

newyorker |  Members of the Trump Administration have taken direct aim at China’s ambitions. Last fall, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that America and its allies must insure that “China retains only its proper place in the world.” During a visit to Europe, he said, “China wants to be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.” The Administration’s argument, in its bluntest form, frames China as a hardened foe, too distant from American values to be susceptible to diplomacy. In April, Kiron Skinner, Pompeo’s director of policy planning, said in a public talk, “This is a fight with a really different civilization.” She added that China represented “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” (The comments caused an uproar. In August, Skinner left the State Department.) Behind closed doors, Trump aides dismiss Skinner’s invocation of race. But they also liken China to such sworn enemies of America as Iran and the Soviet Union, and argue that only hard-line pressure can “crush” its expansion.

Half a century after Henry Kissinger led the secret negotiations that brought Nixon to China, he still meets with leaders in Beijing and Washington. At the age of ninety-six, he has come to believe that the two sides are falling into a spiral of hostile perceptions. “I’m very concerned,” he told me, his baritone now almost a growl. “The way the relationship has deteriorated in recent months will feed, on both sides, the image that the other one is a permanent adversary.” By the end of 2019, the Washington establishment had all but abandoned engagement with China. But there was not yet a strategy to replace it.

In the void, there was a clamor to set rules for dealing with China in business, geopolitics, and culture, all surrounding a central question: Is the contest a new cold war?

Iran Dust-Up Not Important, This 2nd Amendment Fracas is Sincerely Everything

NationalReview |  Ralph Northam is about to make the biggest tactical mistake in Virginia since Cornwallis decided to park his army at Yorktown. With his attempt to force local commonwealth’s attorneys and sheriffs in Second Amendment sanctuaries to enforce his unconstitutional gun laws, Governor Northam is setting himself up for a catastrophic failure. In fact, there’s no way for Northam to win the fight he seems intent on picking with Virginia gun owners and Second Amendment sanctuaries.

The governor isn’t being helped by fellow Democrats such as U.S. congressman Donald McEachin, who said the governor should call out the National Guard to enforce the law, or Attorney General Mark Herring, who blithely says he expects that the laws will be followed once they’re on the books.

There are also Democrats, such as Delegate David Toscano, who have been comparing the Second Amendment–sanctuary movement to the Massive Resistance movement that unfolded in Virginia in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Massive Resistance came about after Democratic governor Thomas B. Stanley organized a state-level opposition movement to the integration of public schools in Virginia in the late 1950s. To compare it to today’s Second Amendment–sanctuary movement is to compare apples and oranges on a couple of different levels.

First of all, the Second Amendment–sanctuary movement is morally just, unlike the Massive Resistance movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The Second Amendment–sanctuary movement isn’t about curtailing rights, but rather about protecting their free exercise.

This Psy-Op is Integrally Related to the 2nd Amendment Fracas in Virginia

gazette |  Air Force Global Strike Command, which is based in Louisiana, has confirmed that it conducts counterdrone exercises out of F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, where it is based.

The command oversees underground Minuteman silos spread across northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the area where the drones have been spotted nightly the past two weeks.

The Air Force isn’t claiming ownership of the drones, but neither is it denying it. 

F.E. Warren didn’t respond to an emailed question Friday on whether its counterdrone effort had anything to do with the recent sightings.

A Federal Aviation Administration map of the region where the drones have been spotted — Logan, Phillips, Sedgwick and Yuma counties — is pocked with red dots of where drones are forbidden, restricted airspace presumably above missile silos.

The Air Force counterdrone program at Warren, which includes extensive testing of civilian drones, relies on innovative technology including Dedrone, a system developed in Europe that detects and tracks small civilian drones using the radio signals they require for control.

Middle Kingdom Conspiracy Theory

SCMP |  The real target of the US assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani – China 

The US has been trying to provoke China into a military conflict since 2013 through the South China Sea, Taiwan, North Korea, Xinjiang and recently Hong Kong.

China will not be able to avoid being dragged into a war over Soleimani’s assassination 

The assassination of Iranian major-general Qassem Soleimani by the United States may be explained by US President Donald Trump’s administration as a retaliation against and deterrence of

Iranian aggression but, in reality, it may actually be a strategic provocation against China. 

 

To understand why this is the case and see how this particular action is merely one piece of a larger puzzle, one must take into account all of America’s foreign policy actions. Since the end of World War II, US foreign policy has been obsessed with how to maintain the nation’s superpower status. It maintains strong alliances like Nato and a military presence in virtually all corners of the planet as part of that strategy.

 

Over the years, influential policymakers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski have argued that the US must go further to ensure supremacy. For some, this includes designating Iran, Russia and China as enemies because the US doesn’t have total control over these countries, and stirring up Islamic extremism because all three of these countries have large Muslim populations that can be turned into terrorists against their own countries.

By creating Islamic extremism in these territories, the home-grown Muslim terrorists could then battle these foreign governments on behalf of the US, thus reducing the need to sacrifice American soldiers.

As a result, such proxy wars have become a permanent fixture on the world stage. The

invasion of Iraq, thecivil warin Syria, the bombing of Libya and many other actions have created extremist groups such asIslamic State that are direct threats to Iran, Russia and even China.

 

With Foolishness and Phukkery Roiling Babylon - Putin Takes Assad to Church...,

reuters |  Accompanied by Assad, Putin visited the Old City of Damascus including, the 8th-century Umayyad mosque and an ancient church.

"I think Putin is there to reinforce the Russian position in Syria and with the person of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, especially as Iran's position has been indelibly weakened, since Soleimani was essentially Iran in Syria," said David Lesch, an expert on Syria.

Though Iran and Russia worked together to beat back the anti-Assad insurgency, tensions have occasionally surfaced between them on the ground, where analysts say they have been vying for influence.

Putin is due to hold talks on Wednesday with President Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, which has sent forces into much of northern Syria to beat back Kurdish-led forces that had been backed by the United States.

Putin's previous trip to Syria was in 2017, when he visited Russia's Hmeymim air base.

Putin told Assad that much had been done to restore Syrian statehood, while Assad thanked Putin for his assistance in restoring peaceful life in Syria, Russia's Interfax news agency reported, citing the Kremlin. Putin will visit several facilities in Syria during the trip, it added.

Soleimani, the Iranian general killed last week, had played a critical role in supervising Iran-backed ground forces to support the Syrian government during the war and coordinated with Moscow ahead of its intervention in 2015.

Don't Forget, Valodya IS the Defender of Christendom...,

sicsempertyrannis |  The tape was filmed in several Christian churches in Aleppo where these two men (Soleimani and al-Muhandis) are described from the pulpit and in the street as "heroic martyr victims of criminal American state terrorism." Pompeo likes to describe Soleimani as the instigator of "massacre" and "genocide" in Syria. Strangely (irony) the Syriac, Armenian Uniate and Presbyterian ministers of the Gospel in this tape do not see him and al-Muhandis that way. They see them as men who helped to defend Aleppo and its minority populations from the wrath of Sunni jihadi Salafists like ISIS and the AQ affiliates in Syria. They see them and Lebanese Hizbullah as having helped save these Christians by fighting alongside the Syrian Army, Russia and other allies like the Druze and Christian militias.

It should be remembered that the US was intent on and may still be intent on replacing the multi-confessional government of Syria with the forces of medieval tyranny. Everyone who really knows anything about the Syrian Civil War knows that the essential character of the New Syrian Army, so beloved by McCain, Graham and the other Ziocons was always jihadi and it was always fully supported by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as a project in establishing Sunni triumphalism. They and the self proclaimed jihadis of HTS (AQ) are still supported in Idlib and western Aleppo provinces both by the Saudis and the present Islamist and neo-Ottoman government of Turkey.

Well pilgrims, there are Christmas trees in the newly re-built Christian churches of Aleppo and these, my brothers and sisters in Christ remember who stood by them in "the last ditch." 

"Currently there are at least 600 churches and 500,000–1,000,000 Christians in Iran." wiki below. Are they dhimmis? Yes, but they are there. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia, not a single one and Christianity is a banned religion. These are our allies?