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Bribing Customers To Get Five-Star Amazon Reviews Is a New Marketing Low

2012-01-28T19:38:00.000-10:00

Bribing Customers To Get Five-Star Amazon Reviews Is a New Marketing Low:

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BY JAMIE CONDLIFFEJAN 27, 2012 6:06 AM

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Bribing Customers To Get Five-Star Amazon Reviews Is a New Marketing Low

We all read reviews and check star ratings on Amazon before we buy stuff. We've already seen that companies sometimes write reviews themselves, and they're easy to spot by the way they're written. But there's a new trend among some less trustworthy Amazon sellers: bribing customers to write favorable reviews.

Accorrding to a report by the New York Times a compnay called VIP Deals has been offering its customers a complete refund on their purchase — while still allowing them to keep the item — in return for a review.

The product in question is a Vipertek brand premium slim black leather case for the Kindle Fire — a fairly lucrative market given how many Kindles were sold over the holidays. VIP Deals have been selling the case for under $10 plus shipping (the official list price was $59.99). The New York Times explains what customers experienced:

When the package arrived it included a letter extending an invitation "to write a product review for the Amazon community."
"In return for writing the review, we will refund your order so you will have received the product for free," it said.
While the letter did not specifically demand a five-star review, it broadly hinted. "We strive to earn 100 percent perfect ‘FIVE-STAR' scores from you!" it said.

Apparently VIP deals has no web site and uses a mailbox drop in suburban Los Angeles as a return address, and last week had received 4,945 reviews on Amazon for a nearly perfect 4.9 rating out of five. Since, Amazon has removed the product page.

Speaking to the New York Times, Anne Marie Logan, a Georgia pharmacist, said: "I was like, ‘Is this for real?' " she said. "But they credited my account. You think it's unethical?" Just a bit, Anne. Just a bit. [New York Times; Image: MikeBlogs]

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Revealed: The FBI Wants to Monitor Social Media

2012-01-27T13:06:00.000-10:00

Revealed: The FBI Wants to Monitor Social Media

1 day ago by Christina Warren107

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The FBI is looking to develop a web application that can monitor social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to gain better real-time intelligence about current or potential future security threats or situations.

This plan was inadvertently revealed by the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) in a market research request for a “Social Media Application.”

The eagle-eyed New Scientist picked up on the request, which aims to “determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application.”

Government agencies like the FBI are usually reluctant to openly discuss how social networks are used as an intelligence tool.

In the Request for Information document, the FBI lays out the requirements for the application that it is seeking to build. In the background portion of the document, the SIOC writes:

The FBI has conducted market research and determined that a geospatial alert and analysis mapping application is the best known solution for attaining and disseminating real time open source intelligence and improving the FBI’s overall situational awareness.

We’ve embedded the six-page document below, but here are some of the highlights:

Provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis, and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI SIOC.
Ability for user to create, define, and select parameters/key word requirements. Automated search of national news, local news, and social media networks. Examples include but are not limited to Fox News. CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Provide instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats that have been vetted and meet the deÔ¨Åned search parameters.
Ability to immediately access geospatial maps with coding in addition to providing critical infrastructural layers. Preferred maps include but are not limited to Google Maps, Google 3D maps, ESRI, and Yahoo Maps.
Ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all “publicly available” tweets across the Twitter Site and any other “publicly available” social networking
sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

The entire document is worth reading, if only to see the request for a “tweet lingo” dictionary within the app.

Monitoring social media activity isn’t limited to the FBI. Earlier this month, House subcommittee members urged the Department of Homeland Security to more closely monitor social media traffic.

While privacy advocates have bristled at the idea of social media monitoring, the government position is that if information is public, it’s fair game for scraping and monitoring.

The FBI’s RFI specifically targets “publicly available information” — rather than anything users keep private.

What do you think about how government agencies and law enforcement are using social media monitoring tools? Let us know in the comments.

Social Media Application Request for Information

Social Media Application

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, adventtr

Who Are The Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers?

2012-01-27T13:00:00.001-10:00

Who Are The Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers?

A month or so back I published a list of ten social media power influencers. I’ve been developing the research since then and now have about 150 social media writers and experts in my power list. Below are the top 50.

The list was compiled using PeekYou‘s social pull metric – which, roughly speaking, measures the number of people in your second degree networks who are identifiable and active (see an explanation and some of the criticism of it in this post about the top 10 women influencers).
Last time out there was criticism of the metric – i.e.the list does not depict influence, at best it shows only popularity. I know PeekYou are adapting the algorithm behind their metrics so this list will change in a few week’s time. However this is my list, as of today, the list I am using for the study that I explain briefly below.

In addition I don’t think you can separate popularity from influence in this new media world. To suggest that one is better than the other or to suggest that popularity does not reflect influence seems to me a tricky claim.
I have excluded from this list writers where we have not been able to identify a minimum of 50% of followers as real people. This seemed like a reasonable response to the quality criticism. Everyone on the list has followers who we can identify more often than not, and their followers’ followers similarly have real identities.
This time round the list also excluded people who are only curating content. All the people on this list create content, and the reason is I needed content to analyze. Why?
Because I am doing a study of what the top social media influencers say – asking, what do they actually talk about?
The study is supported by PeekYou who have given me free access to their software, Leximancer, who have allowed me to use their semantic analysis platform for free, and Global Dawn who have met some of my wages while I do the work. Thanks to all.
That analysis is nearly ready – the report is almost done and it’s with an infographic’s specialist so we can do the visualisations before publishing.
In the study I have taken 40 of the top 100 to analyse and collated their blog material up to a total of 50,000 words each dating from December 2011 backwards.
I’ll hopefully have some results ready next week or the week after.
Finally this list excludes people who have very close cross-over, i.e. writers who, by and large, follow people who follow them.
I have also extended the scope of the list by including people whose mission is clearly social media marketing and not just social media as a topic.
Here are fifty social media writers who have very substantial online followings.
#1. Chris Brogan @chrisbrogan - Chris, President of Human Works, has a social pull of 3,019
#2. Ann Handley @marketingprofs. Ann manages the contributory blog at marketingprofs and has a social pull of 2,962
#3. Guy Kawasaki @guykawasaki, former Apple evangelist, with a social pull, 2,651
#4. Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee, video king, with a social pull of 2,332
#5. Scott Stratten @unmarketing with a pull of 2,218
#6. Robert Scoble @scobleizer, long term blogger and trend setter, pull of 2,216
Note how over the course of 6 writers we’ve already descended from 3,000 to 2,000. The next 14 all fit into the 1,000 + band. So there are fewer people in this exceptionally well connected band than in the one to come.
#7. Glen Gilmore @glengilmore of Gilmore business network, with a pull of 1,944
# 8. Liz Strauss @lizstrauss, of Sucessful Blog, social pull 1,827
#9. Jason Falls @jasonfalls, Social Media Explorer, social pull 1,822
#10. Mari Smith @marismith, Facebook expert, a social pull of 1,806
That’s the top ten. There’s a separation, on average, of approximately 120 points per person at this level. The next ten that gap declines to 45 per person, so a much denser band.
#11. Scott Monty @scottmonty, Ford’s social media champion, with a social pull of 1,776
#12.Renee Blodgett @magicsaucemedia, founder of We Blog The World and other sites, 1667

#13. Pam Moore @pammktgnut of Zoom Factor, with a pull of 1,583
#14. Jeff Bullas @jeffbullas with a pull of 1,568
#15. Paul Barron @paulbarron, pull 1,470
# 16. Ted Coine @tedcoine, author of the switchandshift blog, with a pull of 1,468
#17 Brian Solis @briansolis, one of the most respected names in social, with a pull of 1,439
#18. Chris Voss @chrisvoss, of The Chris Voss Show, social pull 1,434
#19. Eve Mayer Orsburn @linkedinqueen, LinkedIn expert, social pull 1,405
#20. SusanCooper @buzzedition with a pull of 1,325
So that’s the top twenty on my list. As we go down further the density increases, as you might expect. For the next ten the gap is only 23 on average

Media Power Influencers?

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#21. Lori Ruff @loriruff, pull 1,310
#22. Jay Oatway @jayoatway, a specialist in story and influence,1302

#23. Jeremiah Owyang @jowyang of Altimeter Group 1262

#24. Kim Garst @kimgarst, social media and personal branding, 1223

#25. Mike O’Neil @mikeoneilrocks, LinkedIn specialist, 1206

#26. Lori Taylor @lorirtaylor, of Social Caffeine, 1197

#27. Steve Farnsworth @steveology 1185

#28. Neal Schaffer @nealschaffer, of Windmill Networking, 1158

#29. Viveka Von Rosen @linkedinexpert 1123

#30. Jason Yormark @jasonyormark 1077

The gap from here to 40 is on average 17 points.
#31. Marsha Collier @MarshaCollier 1063
#32. Wendi Moore @wendimooreagncy 1051
#33. Chris Abraham @chrisabraham 1014

#34. Yacine Baroudi @fastake 1010

#35. Mark Davidson @markdavidson 985

#36. Michele Smorgon @maxoz 924

#37. Jeff Jarvis @jeffjarvis 919

#38. Steve Rubel @steverubel 915

#39. Shelley Kramer @shellykramer 894

#40. Christopher Penn @cspenn 892

And for the final 10 the average gap is only 10 points. It seems to me the overall distribution suggests the analysis has validity. It would be worrying if the top two or three were absurdly out of whack or if there was no patter in density down the chain. So here are 41 – 50.
#41. Diane Rayfield @dianerayfield 877
#42. Kristi Hines @kikolani 874
#43. Vicki Flaugher @smartwoman 849

#44. Maz Nadjm @mazi 816

#45. Amy Porterfield @amyporterfield 805

#46. David Meerman Scott @dmscott 792

#47. Laurel Papworth @silkcharm 791

#48 Mark Schaefer @markwschaefer 784

#49. Dede Watson @dede_watson 777

#50.Amber Naslund @ambercadabra 773

I’ll come back with some thoughts on the data later in the week. I will also come back to this once PeekYou launch their new platform in a few week’s time. I’m hoping that the new algorithm will help us to explore inmore detail what differences in influence mean.
Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

The visible hand

2012-01-23T13:20:00.000-10:00

The visible hand

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Special report: State capitalism

The visible hand

The crisis of Western liberal capitalism has coincided with the rise of a powerful new form of state capitalism in emerging markets, says Adrian Wooldridge

Jan 21st 2012 | from the print edition

BEATRICE WEBB grew up as a fervent believer in free markets and limited government. Her father was a self-made railway tycoon and her mother an ardent free-trader. One of her family’s closest friends was Herbert Spencer, the leading philosopher of Victorian liberalism. Spencer took a shine to young Beatrice and treated her to lectures on the magic of the market, the survival of the fittest and the evils of the state. But as Beatrice grew up she began to have doubts. Why should the state not intervene in the market to order children out of chimneys and into schools, or to provide sustenance for the hungry and unemployed or to rescue failing industries? In due course Beatrice became one of the leading architects of the welfare state—and a leading apologist for Soviet communism.

The argument about the relative merits of the state and the market that preoccupied young Beatrice has been raging ever since. Between 1900 and 1970 the pro-statists had the wind in their sails. Governments started off by weaving social safety nets and ended up by nationalising huge chunks of the economy. Yet between 1970 and 2000 the free-marketeers made a comeback. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher started a fashion across the West for privatising state-run industries and pruning the welfare state. The Soviet Union and its outriggers collapsed in ruins.

The era of free-market triumphalism has come to a juddering halt, and the crisis that destroyed Lehman Brothers in 2008 is now engulfing much of the rich world. The weakest countries, such as Greece, have already been plunged into chaos. Even the mighty United States has seen the income of the average worker contract every year for the past three years. The Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, which has been measuring the progress of economic freedom for the past four decades, saw its worldwide “freedom index” rise relentlessly from 5.5 (out of 10) in 1980 to 6.7 in 2007. But then it started to move backwards.

The crisis of liberal capitalism has been rendered more serious by the rise of a potent alternative: state capitalism, which tries to meld the powers of the state with the powers of capitalism. It depends on government to pick winners and promote economic growth. But it also uses capitalist tools such as listing state-owned companies on the stockmarket and embracing globalisation. Elements of state capitalism have been seen in the past, for example in the rise of Japan in the 1950s and even of Germany in the 1870s, but never before has it operated on such a scale and with such sophisticated tools.

State capitalism can claim the world’s most successful big economy for its camp. Over the past 30 years China’s GDP has grown at an average rate of 9.5% a year and its international trade by 18% in volume terms. Over the past ten years its GDP has more than trebled to $11 trillion. China has taken over from Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy, and from America as the world’s biggest market for many consumer goods. The Chinese state is the biggest shareholder in the country’s 150 biggest companies and guides and goads thousands more. It shapes the overall market by managing its currency, directing money to favoured industries and working closely with Chinese companies abroad.

State capitalism can also claim some of the world’s most powerful companies. The 13 biggest oil firms, which between them have a grip on more than three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves, are all state-backed. So is the world’s biggest natural-gas company, Russia’s Gazprom. But successful state firms can be found in almost any industry. China Mobile is a mobile-phone goliath with 600m customers. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation is one of the world’s most profitable chemical companies. Russia’s Sberbank is Europe’s third-largest bank by market capitalisation. Dubai Ports is the world’s third-largest ports operator. The airline Emirates is growing at 20% a year.

State capitalism is on the march, overflowing with cash and emboldened by the crisis in the West. State companies make up 80% of the value of the stockmarket in China, 62% in Russia and 38% in Brazil (see chart). They accounted for one-third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment between 2003 and 2010 and an even higher proportion of its most spectacular acquisitions, as well as a growing proportion of the very largest firms: three Chinese state-owned companies rank among the world’s ten biggest companies by revenue, against only two European ones (see chart). Add the exploits of sovereign-wealth funds to the ledger, and it begins to look as if liberal capitalism is in wholesale retreat: New York’s Chrysler Building (or 90% of it anyway) has fallen to Abu Dhabi and Manchester City football club to Qatar. The Chinese have a phrase for it: “The state advances while the private sector retreats.” This is now happening on a global scale.

This special report will focus on the new state capitalism of the emerging world rather than the old state capitalism in Europe, because it reflects the future rather than the past. The report will look mainly at China, Russia and Brazil. The recent protests in Russia against the rigging of parliamentary elections by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, have raised questions about the country’s political stability and, by implication, the future of state capitalism there, but for the moment nothing much seems to have changed. India will not be considered in detail because, although it has some of the world’s biggest state-owned companies, they are more likely to be leftovers of the Licence Raj rather than thrusting new national champions.

Today’s state capitalism also represents a significant advance on its predecessors in several respects. First, it is developing on a much wider scale: China alone accounts for a fifth of the world’s population. Second, it is coming together much more quickly: China and Russia have developed their formula for state capitalism only in the past decade. And third, it has far more sophisticated tools at its disposal. The modern state is more powerful than anything that has gone before: for example, the Chinese Communist Party holds files on vast numbers of its citizens. It is also far better at using capitalist tools to achieve its desired ends. Instead of handing industries to bureaucrats or cronies, it turns them into companies run by professional managers.

The return of history

This special report will cast a sceptical eye on state capitalism. It will raise doubts about the system’s ability to capitalise on its successes when it wants to innovate rather than just catch up, and to correct itself if it takes a wrong turn. Managing the system’s contradictions when the economy is growing rapidly is one thing; doing so when it hits a rough patch quite another. And state capitalism is plagued by cronyism and corruption.

But the report will also argue that state capitalism is the most formidable foe that liberal capitalism has faced so far. State capitalists are wrong to claim that they combine the best of both worlds, but they have learned how to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier state-sponsored growth. And they are flourishing in the dynamic markets of the emerging world, which have been growing at an average of 5.5% a year against the rich world’s 1.6% over the past few years and are likely to account for half the world’s GDP by 2020.

State capitalism increasingly looks like the coming trend. The Brazilian government has forced the departure of the boss of Vale, a mining giant, for being too independent-minded. The French government has set up a sovereign-wealth fund. The South African government is talking openly about nationalising companies and creating national champions. And young economists in the World Bank and other multilateral institutions have begun to discuss embracing a new industrial policy.

That raises some tricky questions about the global economic system. How can you ensure a fair trading system if some companies enjoy the support, overt or covert, of a national government? How can you prevent governments from using companies as instruments of military power? And how can you prevent legitimate worries about fairness from shading into xenophobia and protectionism? Some of the biggest trade rows in recent years—for example, over the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s attempt to buy America’s Unocal in 2005, and over Dubai Ports’ purchase of several American ports—have involved state-owned enterprises. There are likely to be many more in the future.

The rise of state capitalism is also undoing many of the assumptions about the effects of globalisation. Kenichi Ohmae said the nation state was finished. Thomas Friedman argued that governments had to don the golden straitjacket of market discipline. Naomi Klein pointed out that the world’s biggest companies were bigger than many countries. And Francis Fukuyama asserted that history had ended with the triumph of democratic capitalism. Now across much of the world the state is trumping the market and autocracy is triumphing over democracy.

Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy, claims that this is “the end of the free market” in his excellent book of that title. He exaggerates. But he is right that a striking number of governments, particularly in the emerging world, are learning how to use the market to promote political ends. The invisible hand of the market is giving way to the visible, and often authoritarian, hand of state capitalism.

from the print edition | Special report

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Google

2012-01-23T13:17:00.001-10:00

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The war on democracy

John Pilger

Published 19 January 2012

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From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.

Barack Obama, "the Hopey Changey of western violence". Photograph: Getty Images.

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling, girls!"
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said: "I didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."
In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lisette. "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."
Lisette, her family and hundreds of the other islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a journey of a thousand miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser - bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two of the women on board miscarried.
Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette's youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home for ever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."
This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading "Maintaining the Fiction", the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "reclassifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime - in exchange for a $14m discount off a US Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. "There is nothing in our files," said the MoD, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."
Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets on two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.

Wipe-out

What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole political culture behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination in its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis". Longer and bloodier than any other war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "It never happened . . . Even while it was happening it wasn't happening." Last July, the American historian William Blum published his updated "summary of the charming record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World War, the United States has:
1) Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.
2) Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism - but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power, or a society occupying strategically useful territory and deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.
The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to the 11 September 2001 attacks, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (in "Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.
While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Margaret Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered in what the CIA described as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century". This estimate does not include the third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine-guns.
These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of uncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of advertising to soundbites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.
It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in "American Football":
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things . . .
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust . . .
Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers sitting in front of their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.
Remember the tear-stained headlines as Brand Obama was elected: "Momentous, spine-tingling" (the Guardian). "The American future," Simon Schama wrote, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed with anticipation." The San Francisco Chronicle saw a spiritual "Lightworker . . . who can . . . usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America's largest creditor and the new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia, Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Surveillance state

Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act, a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens secretly and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to the US. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and, in effect, repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and "support [the] civil authorities". In other words, US troops are to be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons - the consequence of a "market" extremism that, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14trn in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young, jobless, homeless, incarcerated African Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will feature "a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.
The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of £84bn in jobs and services exceeds even the amount of tax "legally" avoided by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but with a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen and which, as Hywel Williams wrote following the 9/11 attacks, "can itself be a form of self-righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claimed to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain in order to "protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers.
This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos Islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," Lisette said. "And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such is the eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"
I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain next to her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

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2012-01-23T13:13:00.001-10:00

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The Cyberspace Conundrum

An Phung on January 23, 2012, 12:00 AM

China and Russia made the news recently for their relentless cyberattacks on US cyber systems. Earlier this month, viruses originating from these countries are blamed for the theft of personal banking information belonging to students and faculty members at the City College of San Francisco.
Cyber security is posing a major threat to global stability, according to the 2012 Global Risks report. The subject will be on the agenda for the annual World Economic Forum meeting held in Davos later this week. Stories of cyberattacks from China underscore the need for world and business leaders to create solutions that protect sensitive information ranging from personal data to military intelligence.
"Online security is a public good," according to the report. "And new mechanisms are urgently required to secure private investment in exploring existing system vulnerabilities before they can be exploited."
There are several factors that prevent the US from strong-arming China into compliance, according to Adam Segal, counterterrorism and national security expert at the Council of Foreign Relations. Issues pertaining to trade deficits and nuclear proliferation with China's allies trumps concerns about cyber security. Also, the US' is not blameless when it comes to cyberattacks and this complicates the ability to police or dictate what China does. Chinese sources claim that 15 percent of cyberattacks in China originate from US IP addresses, according to Segal.
"When it comes to espionage, everyone does it." said Segal. "You have to assume the United States is hacking into Chinese networks as well."
Calling China out also means the US has to reveal its technical capabilities and this makes them even more vulnerable to hackers, according to Segal.
The cyberattacks wage on and still China is at no risk of losing its economic foothold in US markets, said Segal. Their offenses, however, does not bode well for their image.
"This is having an effect on their public relations image with the rest of the world," said Segal. "It's not just the United States that is complaining about it. It's also India, Japan and the EU."
What are hackers looking for and what is the United States government doing about cyberattacks originating from China? Who specifically in China is attacking US cyber systems? How cooperative are China's leaders when it comes to helping the US mitigate the problem? Since the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and private companies are responsible for their own cyber security, are their any metrics in place to measure the success of their efforts? Chinese internet users frequently employ circumvention software to get around Chinese firewalls and censorship. Some of the software was developed and trafficked into China by Americans. Can it be argued that the US is breaking their rules too? China's government, along with several other closed societies, authored the International Code of Conduct for Information Security and presented it to the 66th UN General Assembly in September last year. It basically asked for sovereignty and freedom to police their own internet without international intervention. Do you think the UN is the right entity to dictate international rules on cyberspace?
Photo courtesy of Don Hankins, Flickr

Tags: adam segal, china, circumvention software, council on foreign relations, cyberattacks, cyberspace, russia, united nations

Ordinary families will be worse off till 2020, report claims | Society | The Guardian

2012-01-22T14:18:00.000-10:00

Ordinary families will be worse off till 2020, report claims | Society | The Guardian:

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Ordinary families will be worse off till 2020, report claims

Thinktank says rich will prosper but 'squeezed middle' will not regain pre-recession earning power for eight years

Randeep Ramesh, social affairs editor
The Guardian, Sunday 22 January 2012
Article history

A report claims it will take eight years for millions of families in Britain's 'squeezed middle' to return to their 2008 earnings. Photograph: Rosemary Roberts/Alamy

Millions of ordinary families are unlikely to see their earnings return to pre-recession levels until at least 2020, a report from a leading thinktank has warned. But it predicts that the income of the wealthy will continue to rise over the same period.

The study, which focuses on the state of the "squeezed middle" and is produced by the independent Resolution Foundation, looks at the situation of 10 million adults, who crucially do not rely heavily on means-tested support from the state, and their 5.2 million children.

A report by the foundation last year led to Ed Miliband's championing of the squeezed middle, a part of Britain that the foundation says remains a key political battleground. It says that households without children earn between £12,000 and £29,000 a year to be part of the squeezed middle; homes with children, between £16,000 and £41,000.

On Monday Labour's welfare spokesman, Liam Byrne, will debate the report's implications with Liberal Democrat MP David Laws at the foundation's London offices.

The two have not met since the former Treasury secretary Byrne's infamous note in 2010 to his successor, Laws, which read: "There's no money left." Since then, the UK's economic woes have deepened and the foundation paints a "gloomy picture on incomes for the next decade".

Byrne told the Guardian that Britain risks replicating the US's "lost decade" where the middle class has fallen so far behind the rich that "Time magazine recently wrote its obituary". Byrne said the report underlined the fact that "the government's economic strategy is doing nothing for jobs, which is why wages are stagnating and welfare reforms are doing nothing for working people. The result is inequality between the middle and the top. Working people do not have a government working on their side."

Taking the Office for Budget Responsibility's latest forecasts, the researchers show that if growth remained sluggish for the next eight years the average annual disposable income of people in this crucial electoral battleground, representing a third of the population, would be £20,200 in 2020 – around £1,700 less than in 2007.

It would take growth rates not seen for almost a decade to let incomes in the squeezed middle return to pre-recession levels by 2020.

While such strong, persistent growth might ensure ordinary families recover lost ground, the real winners would be the top half of the country's earners, whose real disposable income would rise by almost 10% by 2020. Even under the slow growth scenario envisaged by the foundation, the top half of society would see incomes rise by 4%.

The report's author, Matthew Whittaker, said there was a "growing inequality of earnings" at the heart of the long-term squeeze. "Members of the squeezed middle did not share in the spoils of economic growth in the pre-recession years, with wages at the median and below stagnating. Gains instead flowed primarily to higher income households and, more particularly, to those at the very top of the distribution.

"If this trend continues once growth returns it may not be just those on low and middle incomes finding themselves left behind in the next decade, but rather the majority of society."

Part of the reason for the disparity in future spending power according to the report is that the incomes of the lower middle class rise more slowly than the rich, with their spending power eroded by fast-rising fuel and food costs. If low- to middle-income households faced the same price rises as higher earners since 2003 in the types of goods they typically buy they would be better off by £427 in 2011.

The report says the squeezed middle also has to cope with a prolonged wage squeeze – with real wages falling 4.2% over the last year – and warns that the most significant cuts to tax credits have yet to kick in. It says that the major recipients of tax credits are facing a further loss of income of nearly half a billion pounds from this April.

According to the report's calculation, this will see 2 million households worse off by £305 in 2012.

Whittaker pointed out that as the coalition's cuts have hit women harder than men, lower to middle-income families are likely to be "hurt twice". There are also dire figures for young people in rented accommodation and for young property owners who had already borrowed too much to get on the housing ladder, leaving themselves dangerously exposed if interest rates rise.

The proportion renting and aged under 35 has soared from 28% to 47% in the last six years alone.

In the same period the number of homes owned by under-35 members of the squeezed middle fell from almost a third from 770,000 to 562,000.

Those with mortgages may be benefiting from record low interest rates, but with one in five signing up to a 100% mortgage before the recession, a quarter of families still spend between 25% and 50% of their income on their mortgage.

Gordon Brown's administration realised too late to do anything about the widening gap. A treasury paper in 2009, obtained by the Guardian, identifies a "squeezed middle" facing stagnant or falling wages since 2004 – believed to be the first official reference to the phenomenon.

To solve this, Brown's Treasury argued in 2009 for removing "low level regulatory burdens" on the industries such as retail and hotels where "squeezed Britain" works. It also suggests finding ways to get 10 hours more per week per household by 2020 by finding ways of making work more family friendly. It controversially called for "the tax and benefit system to transfer £2bn more each year".

Whittaker said the foundation's analysis "shows rising pressure from pretty much all sides".

He added: "continued low interest rates and the start of a fall in inflationoffer only limited respite. This will be far outweighed by further deep cuts to tax credits due this April which will come as a shock on top of the continued wage squeeze."

A spokesman for the Treasury said: "The government has taken decisive action to tackle the deficit, which has helped to keep interest rates low for businesses and families. We recognise that people are feeling squeezed and the government is doing what it can to help, reducing fuel duty so taxes on fuel are 6p lower than they would have been, freezing council tax and implementing an increase in the personal allowance in April, taking over 800,000 of the lowest paid out of tax."

Secret Service investigating Jewish newspaper column that discussed Obama assassination

2012-01-20T14:17:00.000-10:00

Politics

Secret Service investigating Jewish newspaper column that discussed Obama assassination

By Judson Berger

Published January 20, 2012

| FoxNews.com

The Secret Service said it is looking into a recent op-ed from an Atlanta publisher that floated the idea of green-lighting Israeli Mossad agents to assassinate President Obama in order to improve Israel's security against enemies like Iran.

The publisher and author, Andrew Adler, reportedly has apologized.

But Jewish advocacy groups condemned his comments as "outrageous," and Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie said the agency is "aware" of the incident.

"We're conducting the appropriate investigative steps," he told FoxNews.com.

Ogilvie would not comment on whether Adler has been contacted or whether his column was deemed a potential threat to the president.

In the Jan. 13 column in the Atlanta Jewish Times, Adler floated three scenarios for how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would deal with a nuclear Iran and other threats in the region.

Adler wrote that Israel could order a strike on Hezbollah and Hamas, or a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

A third option, he wrote, would be to "give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies."

Leaving no question about what he was suggesting, Adler went on:

"Yes, you read 'three' correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles? Another way of putting 'three' in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of 7 million lives...Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?"

Adler later told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he will publish an apology. "I very much regret it," he said.

But Jewish advocacy groups were outraged.

Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said there is "no excuse" for that kind of rhetoric.

"It doesn't even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage," he said in a statement. "Mr. Adler's lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he's fit to run a newspaper."

The National Jewish Democratic Council described the comments as "despicable."

"It is the height of irresponsibility to make the horrific suggestion that the State of Israel should assassinate the President of the United States of America," NJDC President David Harris said in a statement. "To dare to give such despicable ideas space in a newspaper -- no less in the words of the paper's owner and publisher, and a Jewish newspaper at that -- is beyond the pale."

Adler has not responded to a request from FoxNews.com for comment.

The website Gawker first reported, and posted, the column.

The newspaper that said ‘up yours’ to the Internet - Portfolio Insights by Brett Arends - MarketWatch

2012-01-20T13:59:00.000-10:00

The newspaper that said ‘up yours’ to the Internet - Portfolio Insights by Brett Arends - MarketWatch:

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PORTFOLIO INSIGHTS BY BRETT ARENDS Archives | Email alerts

Jan. 20, 2012, 6:30 p.m. EST · CORRECTED

The newspaper that said ‘up yours’ to the Internet

Commentary: You only cheapen your work when you give it away

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By Brett Arends, MarketWatch

This update corrects the number a typographical error in Private Eye’s record number of copies sold.

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — You gotta be online.

In the exciting new digital world, journalism has to appear on the Web for free.

You gotta blog. You gotta tweet. You gotta update your Facebook status. All the bloggers are doing it. All your competitors are doing it. You gotta keep up! Shorter! Faster! Now!

So says conventional wisdom. Is it true?

Listen to a counter-revolutionary.

Ian Hislop is the editor of Britain’s legendary satirical newspaper, Private Eye. The Eye mixes spoof news stories and hilarious cartoons with political gossip and old-school, investigative reporting. Hislop has edited the paper for half its 50-year existence.

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This week he appeared before the Leveson Inquiry, the British government investigation into the press that was sparked by the phone-hacking scandal at The News of the World (a British newspaper published until last year by News Corp. NWS -0.36% , which also owns MarketWatch). Most media coverage of Hislop’s appearance focused on his robust rejection of calls for tighter regulation of the media.

But less attention was given to comments he made which were arguably more interesting: Hislop thinks newspaper companies are crazy to give away their products for free on the web. “I can’t see why journalism, which at its best is a noble craft, should be given away,” he said.

After his appearance I interviewed him by phone. I know Hislop — I used to be a contributor to the Eye, back in the day, and sometimes when I’m back in London I stop by one of the magazine’s famous (or infamous) lunches at the Coach & Horses pub in Soho.

Reuters

Private Eye editor Ian Hislop poses behind a replica of his desk at an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in honor of the newspaper’s 50 years of publication.

Private Eye doesn’t publish online. If you want to read the newspaper, you have to buy it, and pay about $2.25.

“There’s just a few teasers,” Hislop says of the company website. The posts say, in effect, “we’ve got a good piece on this, and if you want to read it, go and pay for it.”

Sacrilege!

Hislop explained that he made this decision over a decade ago. During the late 1990s, when everyone was rushing onto the Internet, he decided it was all madness. “Everyone was putting stuff up on the Internet. Everyone said, ‘You’ve got to get (the Eye) up there, you’ve got to get it out there, everyone wants everything for free.’ I just couldn’t understand how it would work.”

By Brett Arends, MarketWatch

Continued from page 1

Page 1Page 2

He confesses he may “sound like a Luddite,” but he was skeptical of the business model right from the start. “They said, ‘We’re going to get lots of advertising,’ and they didn’t.”

At the time, the industry thought Hislop was mad. The paper would vanish into irrelevance, people said. It would start by losing all its new readers, and would be stuck with old fogeys. “Every consultant was saying, ‘No young person is going to read you, they want everything for free.’”

How has it worked out?

I turned to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the industry standard for measuring newspaper sales, for numbers.

In the past 10 years, the number of newspapers sold in Great Britain every day has plunged from 13.3 million to 9.88 million.

Private Eye publishes every two weeks, and targets higher-end consumers. So the market to which it should probably best be compared are the so-called “quality” Sundays. According to ABC, from the first half of 2001 through the first half of 2011, sales of those have collapsed by a third, from just over 3 million copies each Sunday across the entire industry to just over 2 million copies.

How has Private Eye fared over all that time?

According to ABC, 10 years ago it had average sales of 176,000 copies.

Last year? try 206,000 — a 17% increase.

And all but 2,000 of those copies are fully-paid sales, either in the newsstand or by subscription. By contrast, most of the regular newspapers get a growing share of their circulation from discounted bulk sales, promotions and so on.

Furthermore, during the past 10 years Private Eye has actually increased its cover price by 50%, from 1 British pound to 1.50 pounds.

“Paid circulation is up, we are bucking the trend, and our anniversary issue sold all-time record 267,873 copies,” says Hislop, who then made fun of himself for boasting. The Eye’s publishing company, which is privately held, remains profitable — despite the hefty legal costs involved in breaking scoops about most of the crooks in Great Britain. (It doesn’t hurt that the Eye runs a small staff — 10 full-time, and about 30 contributors.)

How has it bucked the trend? The Eye has a product that’s distinctive and valuable. It’s the funniest publication in Britain, as well as probably the best source of investigative reporting, and it’s required reading the moment it comes out each fortnight. Few, if any, competitors try to do what it does, and even fewer do it consistently. That gives it some market clout to charge.

(Hislop notes that his famous counterpart in France, Le Canard Enchaine, also refuses to publish online — and is also successful.) But the Eye has also succeeded because, quite simply, it has refused to devalue itself by giving its product away for free.

Think: If Tiffany’s acted like a newspaper, they’d have cut their prices to match those of Hong Kong counterfeiters, and the stock would be in free fall.

Today some news companies are trying to restore pricing. The New York Times Co.NYT -2.65% has introduced a hybrid free-and-pay plan. News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal charges, while its London newspaper the Times has a paywall.

Does Hislop think mainstream newspapers can somehow restore their pricing power? “I’d love to think so,” he says. “It may sound funny for me to say, because of our (critical) history with Murdoch, but I hope he succeeds.”

His message to those running the rest of the industry: “Don’t give the stuff away. The industry’s going to die if you don’t believe in it.”

Brett Arends is a senior columnist for MarketWatch and a personal-finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

California Roll House By Christopher Daniel | Design Milk

2012-01-19T18:59:00.000-10:00

California Roll House By Christopher Daniel | Design Milk:

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CALIFORNIA ROLL HOUSE BY CHRISTOPHER DANIEL

Posted on 01.19.12 by Caroline in Architecture

The California Roll House is a futuristic concept design for a prefabricated house that Christopher Daniel of Violent Volumes has created. The house was designed with a desert setting in mind with its exterior wrapped in an energy-efficient material that reflects heat from the sun. The house appears rolled to form a tube-like shape with glass on either end that is controlled electronically to change the transparency for privacy and light control. The modular nature of the design makes for easy assembly and disassembly on site.

To maximize space, doors are hydraulically powered and curtains provide privacy as a space divider in the bedroom.

The interior design is fairly minimal which allows for open, light-filled spaces.

Tags: Christopher Daniel, eco-friendly, residential, Violent Volumes

BBC News - How China is advancing its military reach

2012-01-18T19:29:00.000-10:00

BBC News - How China is advancing its military reach:

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17 January 2012 Last updated at 19:30 ET

How China is advancing its military reach

In recent months China's airforce and navy have rolled out new hardware

As the US shifts its focus to Asia, Alexander Neill, head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute, sets out the Chinese military advances challenging the regional balance.

At the Pentagon recently, US President Barack Obama announced deep cuts to the US military and set out a shift in attention towards the Asia-Pacific region, in a thinly-veiled message to China.

Despite a narrative of peaceful intent, China's leaders have struggled to reassure the US over the direction of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Both countries admit that their military dialogue falls well behind other aspects of the relationship.

So the shift has brought renewed scrutiny of the PLA's latest capabilities against US dominance in the Pacific.

In recent years the PLA has demonstrated impressive new capabilities at sea and in space, aimed at showcasing the success of its modernisation effort.

The obvious message is to deliver a powerful warning if Taiwan were to declare formal independence.

But Pentagon planners are now concerned that the Taiwan contingency has been eclipsed by China's broader maritime territorial claims and demands for more international space to protect the arteries feeding China's growth.

'Unrestricted warfare'

China is developing a range of capabilities linked to the space and cyber domain in order to sidestep the overwhelming might of the US military in the Pacific region. The PLA calls this fighting "local wars under informationised conditions".

China took the first step towards a space station when it launched the Tiangong 1 module

China recognised almost two decades ago that in the mid-term the PLA could be no match for US conventional forces. So it began working on what was dubbed "unrestricted warfare" - combining multiple methods to defeat a superior opponent.

At the same time party leaders launched adventurous civilian acquisition projects in the high-tech domain to increase Chinese competitiveness and to boost indigenous production capabilities.

The PLA has been running military projects mirroring these civilian acquisition ventures. Sometimes involving dual-use technologies, the military and civilian strands have often been indistinguishable.

China's space programme is a case in point. The recent successful docking manoeuvre between a Shenzhou module and the Tiangong Space station is as much a triumph for the PLA as it is for China's civilian space agency.

Space theatre

Should the US ever intervene in a cross-strait clash or challenge China's maritime claims, Beijing would employ a pre-emptive "sea denial" strategy alongside its conventional operations - preventing US battle carrier groups operating in or near its claimed territorial waters.

Its submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles are now a lethal force. China's long-range nuclear weapons systems have also undergone significant upgrades and its strategic rocket force, the Second Artillery Corps, is very much the pride of the PLA.

One of the most pressing concerns for the US navy is the threat posed by a "carrier killer" anti-ship missile with enhanced targeting capabilities facilitated from space. China very recently launched its own Beidou Positioning System, challenging the monopoly of the US Global Positioning System (GPS).

One of the PLA's most sensitive advances has been the secret deployment and testing of advanced anti-satellite (ASAT) and Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) weapons systems.

Two years ago, China successfully intercepted one of its own ballistic missiles as it streaked through space. This test coincided with the Pentagon's sale of Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) Patriot systems to Taiwan.

Some experts believe a Chinese ASAT campaign against a careful selected group of US satellites could have catastrophic effect on the US military.

This capability, combined with the potential for China to develop its own Ballistic Missile Defence umbrella, suggests that the space domain will be a new theatre for US-China rivalry.

Chinese ASAT capabilities are not exclusively reserved for "kill vehicles", like the one which obliterated an ageing Chinese weather satellite in 2007.

It is now believed that the successful 2007 "kill" was in fact the third test in a series. Previous tests had demonstrated an ability to manoeuvre in proximity to targeted satellites.

This would suggest that China has experimented with techniques which could be used for "space mining", where mines or mini-satellites armed with jamming technologies could be placed within the orbits of an opponent's spacecraft.

Carrier group

In addition to its "sea denial" and space warfare strategies, China is also expanding its conventional capabilities.

The PLA Air Force in recent years has extended its ability for offshore operations, enhancing an offensive capability. It is planning an overhaul of its ageing fleet with the deployment of over 3,000 new aircraft.

China first aircraft carrier began sea trials in 2011

For the most part China has relied on copying Russian fighter technology. However, the roll-out of the Chengdu J-20 Stealth fighter prototype raised eyebrows last year, carefully timed to coincide with a visit by the US defence secretary.

There have been some very significant developments in the deployment of Chinese submarines in recent years. Beijing possesses 10 Russian-built ultra-quiet Kilo class submarines possibly armed with 200km-range anti-ship cruise missiles.

Since 2006, when a Chinese submarine surfaced undetected within torpedo range of the US aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, China's submarine force has regularly marauded the US Navy and its allies in the Pacific.

It is thought that China plans to build three aircraft carrier battle groups, each armed with 40 fighters, up to eight warships, three nuclear-powered attack submarines and a number of support vessels. The PLA Navy's retrofitted Varyag carrier, currently under sea-trials, will serve as a training platform.

Even if the aircraft carrier would likely be a prestige piece and more directed at Chinese domestic pride, the prospect of a Chinese aircraft carrier will certainly cause ripples for the broader East Asian naval balance.

Uncertain factors

While much attention has been paid to the breakneck speed of Chinese military modernisation over the last decade, the events of 9/11 and the subsequent campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan provided a window of opportunity for China to accelerate development.

In some cases there may have been, quite literally, windfalls for the PLA. There is speculation that China acquired undamaged Tomahawk cruise missile components in the early stages of the Afghanistan campaign a decade ago.

When US special forces failed to completely destroy one of their stealth helicopters during Operation Geronimo, Pakistan's military may have allowed PLA counterparts to inspect the tail rotor.

The PLA must be congratulating itself on the impressive array of weaponry which has tilted the balance in the Taiwan Strait in its favour.

China's new-found capabilities combined with the opaque nature of its military modernisation create a formula for mistrust with the US.

There are perhaps three factors for uncertainty. Firstly, the Chinese military's confidence in its new equipment could lead to an overestimation of its capability as an emerging great power.

Secondly, the Chinese leadership could underestimate its ability to control an unexpected escalation of hostilities in the Pacific.

Finally, the domestic political factor - the PLA's external behaviour could become a reaction to internal nationalistic sentiment, instability or faction fighting as Beijing prepares for the fifth generation leadership handover this year.

oils of aloha

2012-01-18T11:34:00.001-10:00

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http://thebigislandreporter.com/oilsofaloha.html

Oils of Aloha offers a simple, convenient way to reap the many natural benefits of Hawaii's native oils. Since 1988 we have produced quality kukui and macadamia oil in its purest form for a variety of applications utilizing a highly refined extraction process. Learn more about our company, consumer products, technical data or contact us for more information.

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2012-01-17T10:05:00.002-10:00

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"Discover the Best Kept Secret of Las Vegas"

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Ordinary families will be worse off till 2020, report claims | Society | The Guardian

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The newspaper that said ‘up yours’ to the Internet - Portfolio Insights by Brett Arends - MarketWatch

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