Tuesday, February 3, 2015
China's 2nd aircraft carrier nears construction phase
The construction of China's second aircraft carrier appears to be imminent, reports the Global Times, a tabloid under the auspices of the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily.
On Saturday, the official microblog of the Changzhou city government in east China's Jiangsu province posted that a local company, Jiangsu Shangshang Cable Group, has won a tender to supply cabling for "China's second aircraft carrier."
The post was backed up by a report by the Changzhou Evening News on the same day, though both the microblog post and the article were deleted shortly after publication.
According to the Global Times, Jiangsu Shangshang Cable Group was a supplier of China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, a refitted former Soviet carrier which was commissioned in September 2012.
In the international arena, most countries usually require three aircraft carriers — one on duty, one for training, and one in maintenance, the Global Times said. In April 2013, Song Xue, the chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army Navy, said that China will eventually have more than just one aircraft carrier, but denied reports that a shipbuilder had already commenced work in Shanghai. In August later that year, Chinese defense ministry spokesperson Yang Yujun concurred that while the Liaoning is China's first aircraft carrier, it certainly won't be the last.
Modern aircraft carriers require a major long-term investment that involves complex analyses, design, construction and testing, the Global Times said. Chinese military commentary Li Xiaojian told the tabloid that the tender process for a new aircraft carrier will only begin after the overall planning and design process has been completed, suggesting that the recent reports mean China's second aircraft carrier could soon be entering the construction phase.
It remains unclear whether the new aircraft carrier will be conventionally or nuclear powered, though according to the Voice of Russia, China intends to have two conventionally-powered aircraft carriers to accumulate the necessary experience to boost the PLA Navy's offshore attack capabilities.
Credit to China Times
The Mark Of The Beast Could Be Here Anytime After The Next 12 Months
Biometric markers could surpass passwords within 12 months.
That would mean a shift from notoriously weak letter-and-number combinations to stronger, less hackable protection measures like fingerprint authentication. Services such as Apple Pay — which requires users to scan their fingerprint to enable transactions — are already preparing the public for that transition, which could blossom in the next 12 to 24 months, Nelsen said after the event. “It’s moving beyond the password as a way to authenticate yourself and really adopting more of those biometrics,” Nelsen said.
He pointed to Braintree, the Chicago-based payments processor and software developer acquired by PayPal in 2013, as the type of company that could make the technology needed for this shift more accessible
Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk products and business intelligence at Visa, who was in town Thursday to join a panel on keeping customer trust.
Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk products and business intelligence at Visa, who was in town Thursday to join a panel on keeping customer trust.
What's the best payment system for your small business?
Services such as Apple Pay — which requires users to scan their fingerprint to enable transactions — are already preparing the public for that transition, which could blossom in the next 12 to 24 months, Nelsen said after the event.
“It's moving beyond the password as a way to authenticate yourself and really adopting more of those biometrics,” Nelsen said.
He pointed to Braintree, the Chicago-based payments processor and software developer acquired by PayPal in 2013, as the type of company that could make the technology needed for this shift more accessible.
“They would be one that would be trying to either develop applications that can use that kind of stronger authentication,” Nelsen said.
For example, Braintree could create a program that allows people to log into their accounts with their voice, Nelsen said. The company could then license that out to others who want to offer the same capability.
(Braintree wouldn't discuss specifics about any such plans, but noted: "Technologies like biometrics present exciting opportunities for payments and other industries to improve their user experience. ... Our parent company, PayPal, has worked with Samsung to allow users to login and pay using their fingerprint on their newest Samsung smartphones and tablet devices — the Galaxy S5, Tab S and Note 4.”)
Widespread adoption of biometric authentication for processes that involve personal data or financial transactions will require something some consumers have lost in recent months: trust. Nelsen said as awareness of and education about the superior security of technologies such as fingerprint scanning grows, so will people’s willingness to use them.
Companies will likely continue to offer traditional authentication alongside biometric options to give consumers a choice. But they should at the very least raise their protection standards for the data they hold, Nelsen said.
Credit to Raidersnewsupdate and Chicago Tribune
North Korea holds drill targeting US aircraft carrier
US aircraft carrier USS George Washington. (File photo/CNS)
Kim Jong-un personally commanded a North Korean military exercise in late January, which was centered around the attack of a US aircraft carrier, reports China's Global Times.
Kim urged the Korean People's Army to increase its combat readiness against US aircraft carrier striking groups. The dictator is confident that the carriers can be beaten if the army diligently studies and improves its strategies for guerrilla warfare and looks for weaknesses in the enemy, the report said.
During the exercise, Kim learned about the deployment methods and orders in an island invasion scenario. The island reportedly doubled as an mock aircraft carrier. The first order that Kim gave was sending out the North Korean Air Force.
He said the country's enemies have been arrogant because of their state-of-the-art military technology. However, a country's military power should not simply be assessed by its weapons and physical strength alone but also on its spirit and ideology, said the report.
Kim denounced the group of "mad dogs" calling North Korea's ideology and system totalitarianism and claiming that they will change the country's socialist system, the report said. Kim said the country will face the US in any war, in any battle and prepare for any condition, conventional or nuclear.
South Korea's Arirang TV said the exercise was the second one that Pyongyang has held in last month. The first was held on Jan. 23.
Credit to China Times
Delusional America
Robert Parry is one of my favorite columnists. He is truthful, has a sense of justice, and delivers a firm punch. He used to be a “mainstream journalist,” like me, but we were too truthful for them. They kicked us out.
I can’t say Parry has always been one of my favorite journalists. During the 1980s he spent a lot of time on Reagan’s case. Having been on corporate boards, I know that CEOs seldom know everything that is going on in the company. There are just too many people and too many programs representing too many agendas. For presidents of countries with governments as large as the US government, there is far more going on than a president has time to learn about even if he could get accurate information.
In my day Assistant Secretaries and chiefs of staff were the most important people, because they controlled the flow of information. Presidents have to focus on fund raising for their reelection and for their party. More time and energy is used up with formalities and meetings with dignitaries and media events. At the most there are two or three issues on which a president can attempt leadership. If an organized clique such as the neoconservatives get into varied positions of authority, they can actually “create the reality” and take the government away from the president.
As I have reported on many occasions, my experience with Reagan left me with the conclusion that he was interested in two big issues. He wanted to stop the stagflation for which only the supply-side economists had a solution, and he wanted to end, not win, the cold war.
Both of these agendas put Reagan at odds with two of the most powerful of the private interest groups: Wall Street and the military/security complex.
Wall Street for the most part opposed Reagan’s economic program. They opposed it because they understood it as Keynesian deficit pump-priming that would cause an already high inflation rate to explode, which would drive down bond and stock prices.
The CIA and the military opposed any ending of the Cold War because of the obvious impact on their power and budget.
Left-wing journalists never picked up on this, and neither did right-wing journalists.
The left could not get beyond Reagan’s rhetoric. For the left, Reagan was trickle-down economics, Iran/Contra, and the fired air traffic controllers.
The right-wing liked Reagan’s rhetoric and blamed him for not delivering on it.
For the left, the Reagan years were a traumatic time. Robert Parry has never recovered from them. He can scarcely write a column about events today, which are horrific in comparison, without dragging Reagan into it. Parry doesn’t realize it, but if it is all Reagan’s fault, little wonder it has been impossible to hold Clinton, Bush 1 and 2, and Obama accountable.
Having written these lines, I already detect the denunciations coming my way for again attempting to “rehabilitate Ronald Ray-Gun.” Reagan does not need rehabilitating. This column is not about Reagan, and it is not a criticism of Parry. It is praise for Parry’s column, “‘Group-thinking’ the World into a New War.” Read it.
The pattern since Milosevic (and before) has been to demonize a foreign head of state and to take the US to war to get rid of him. That way the secret agenda is achieved under the cover of the necessity of deposing a bad or dangerous ruler.
Parry describes this well. Group-Think plays the important role of preventing any dissent, any suspicion of the case against the demonized person, and any examination of the real agenda that is being pursued.
Now it is Russian President Vladimir Putin who is being demonized. As Parry and I and Stephen F. Cohen, the most knowledgeable of the Russian experts, appreciate, Putin is not Saddam Hussein and Russia is not Iraq, Libya, Syria, Serbia, or Iran. To foment conflict with Russia that could lead to war is worse than irresponsible. Yet, as Parry writes, “from the start of the Ukraine crisis in fall 2013, the New York Times, the Washington Post and virtually every mainstream U.S. news outlet have behaved as dishonestly as they did during the run-up to war with Iraq.”
When Professor Cohen pointed out, correctly, that the lies about Russia, Ukraine, and Putin were hot and heavy, the propagandists had to get rid of the man with the facts. The New Republic, a hang-out for low IQ fools, called America’s leading Russian expert “Putin’s American toady.”
From Parry’s reporting, it appears that Group-Think has spread from the media and foreign policy community into the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, which has decided that academic careers require adherence to the government’s propaganda line, which means the neoconservatives’ line.
As I have written on a number of occasions, facts no longer play a role in American political life. Fact-based analysis is also disappearing from academic life and no longer plays a role in official economic reporting. A matrix has been created, an artificial reality that channels the energies and resources of the country into secret agendas that serve the interests of the ruling private interest groups and neoconservative ideology.
The United States government and the American people cannot contend with reality, because they do not know what the reality is.
In America’s make-believe world, neoconservative toadies such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, set the Group-Think tone, while knowledgeable experts such as Stephen Cohen are tuned out.
In effect, America is both blind and deaf. It lives in delusions. Consequently, it will destroy itself and perhaps the world.
Credit to Paul Craig Roberts
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