Thing is that the sanctions mean that most Western banks are prohibited from providing them with services because they are also present in the USA. That's a lot more problematic.
It simply means that free, independent nations will increasingly make their own arrangements, cutting out the US-controlled banks and institutions entirely. This is already well under way in Russia, China and Iran - and a lot of other countries can see which way the wind is blowing.
If someone potentially hostile is holding your testicles, it is wise to take steps to change the situation. Perhaps by getting someone else to deal the aggressor a smart blow to the head, or - all else failing - by grabbing his nuts, which at least equalizes things.
Further plenty of countries will be happy to arrest them pending extradition to the USA, including pretty much the entire EU [among] others.
Then they simply stay out of those countries, whose numbers are likely to drop rather smartly once they realise the consequences of arbitrarily arresting foreigners without any legal basis. (Just as I suspect we shan't be seeing a lot more Chinese nationals being arrested by Canada or the USA).
They will also be unable to get diplomatic passports for pretty much anywhere now, and if Russia issues false identities to get them diplomatic passports they are invalid and that diplomatic immunity is out the window.
You don't seem to understand how diplomatic passports work. They are issued by a person's own government, like any other passports. If a host nation does not wish to allow entry to a given foreign national - even with a diplomatic passport - that is its right. Of course, denying entry to accredited diplomats is a rather unfriendly move, and would be taken into account in future relations.
Above all, you don't seem to understand that the "new world order" some deranged people in Washington hoped for does not exist. The USA accounts for about 4% of the world's population, and although George Kennan and others resolved in the 1940s to make sure that the USA went on consuming at least 25% of the world's resources, those days are over.
Actually, deliberately spreading false statements in an effort to sway voters one way or another sounds like election meddling to me -- trying to add votes is called fraud, not meddling.
And who is the anointed judge of which statements are true, and which are false?
Obama and other have claimed that everything was paid back and "the taxpayer made a profit". Well, I doubt if any taxpayers have seen any of the money that was paid back. That will have gone straight into killing people in Asia and Africa, and maybe trying to make the F-35 fly in the rain without killing its pilots.
But what do you mean by "the bank bailouts"? Obama mentioned a few hundred billion - lunch money to the Pentagon. How about $16.8 trillion and counting as of 2015? Who has paid THAT back - and why haven't we heard about it?
Meh. Come back when China's average person is as well off as a the US's average person. As a middle class member I'd rather be anywhere in the US than anywhere else in the world from an economic standpoint.
You'd like to live in San Francisco, for instance?
He's absolutely right. We've spent trillions of dollars destroying and then rebuilding infrastructure for the Taliban and other terrorist organizations while allowing our own to rot.
Half right, half absolutely wrong.
The US government has spent at least $3 trillion since 2001 destroying infrastructure in Asia and Africa.
But it hasn't rebuilt a single thing. Even in Raqqa, which it bombed relentlessly for months, there are still tens of thousands of corpses rotting under the ruins.
Killed over 10 million people - I'm looking at the whole of Asia, optionally with Africa and South America thrown in - since 1945. That's about 2-3 Holocausts, depending on who's counting.
Oh, and overthrown the governments of a few dozen nations, and destroyed their infrastructure.
If you can't make your own people rich, prosperous and happy, why not make everyone else poor, desperate and miserable? (Those who aren't dead).
It's much easier. And, as some people see it, more fun.
You foolish person, Taiwan is part of China, just as Crimea is part of Russia - and Hawaii, Alaska, Diego Garcia and Guam are not part of the USA. And the Falkland Islands are not part of Britain.
All you need is a globe, or an Atlas, and the ability to read a map.
Actually, that should read "In continental USA... Russian ICBM finds YOU".
Especially if you are a member of the political elite who believes they can safely start wars in faraway places and never suffer the consequences themselves.
They must have assumed that nobody on the plane spoke English.
That's always a safe bet anywhere in the world nowadays. Especially on airliners. After all, English is just a hole-in-corner minority language of no interest to most people.
But Yandex, Bing, Google and everyone else blurring out the images means there are non-military, non-intelligence-agent people having access to the clear images they later blurr. So you don't know who else has access to those images.
Oh... my... God. So you mean that the taxpayers whose money bought all those ridiculously expensive weapons might learn where they are deployed? My, that is really awful.
So now In America you have to prove you had NOT committed any crime, rather than the prosecution proving that you had committed a crime?
Well, that is so if you are (A) one of the least privileged 99.9%; or (B) a despised and hated foreigner.
If you are one of the elite, there is hardly a law you cannot break (or, more precisely, ignore) with utter impunity. That's the way the system works, and that's the way it was set up to work back in 1776-94.
For more than 100 years Canada and the United States have been partners against all types of dictatorships and evil.. The world is evil. Communist China is evil.
Surely you don't really believe a word of that. At any rate, by posting it you have lost all credibility.
The world is NOT black and white, good versus evil. It contains a lot of people who do very good things, and a lot of people who do very bad things; those people are pretty evenly distributed. Largely, the amount of good or harm an individual does is a matter of opportunity.
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being".
That certainly won't happen. The Chinese are the calmest, most level-header players at the top table. They are about as emotional as a chess (or maybe Go) grandmaster considering her next move.
As I understand it, a US court has ordered the arrest and extradition of a Chinese corporation's CFO on charges of fraud.
Does that mean that Chinese, European and other countries' courts will now be able to arrest and extradite the American executives responsible for the 2008 crash? Between them they caused trillions of dollars of losses worldwide, not a penny of which they paid themselves. Governments had to milk their taxpayers for said trillions in order to "make good" the balance sheets and reserves of supposedly system-critical banks and other financial institutions.
This was the biggest fraud in the history of the world, yet how many executives have been indicted in the USA? https://radiofreethinker.files...
Zero.
“Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men reported that on March 27 2009, just two months after taking office, [Obama] invited the executives of thirteen leading Wall Street institutions to the White House. After listening to their arguments for why banks had to go on paying bonuses (ostensibly to get the best talent to manage their money), Obama told them: ‘Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that’. He explained that only he could provide them with the political shield needed to forestall public pressure for reform, not to mention prosecution of financial fraud. ‘My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks’”.
"... intended to serve as a 'call to action' to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits..."
An interesting selection of examples, especially if they are meant to correspond to categories of "misinformation".
"Fake news" is a hopelessly meaningless term. As William Randolph Hearst is said to have declared, "News is something someone doesn't want printed. All else is advertizing".
That being so, we can always rely on those who don't want any particular piece of news printed to denounce it as "fake news". Although the scope for such disagreements can be reduced if reporters are careful to stick to the facts, all the facts and nothing but the facts. It's when interpretation and opinion slip in that "news reports" become hopelessly contentious and divisive. It also helps if reporters are always careful to list their sources for all claims. (For example, "in the vicious war between X and Y, today Y cruelly murdered 5,000 tiny helpless children *according to X*" is not very persuasive).
"Flat earthers" probably get little support these days, as belief that the Earth is an oblate spheroid has a great deal of evidence behind it.
"Anti-vaxxers" (presumably meaning people who are concerned that some vaccinations may cause harm) are rather different, as there may well be evidence supporting their position. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity in the issue: which vaccination exactly (or what combination), given to whom under what circumstances?
And then there are the other obvious public issues, such as anthropogenic climate change (and how much it matters), the rights and wrongs of political and geopolitical disagreements, even the strengths and weaknesses of various programming languages...
Surely we should all be "vigilant" for incorrect statements and claims. But it would be wrong to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and condemn reasonable or plausible statements and claims just because they are currently unfashionable.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind".
- John Stuart Mill
Especially as, in the past, the one person has sometimes been right, and the rest of mankind wrong.
[Our] adversaries spend billions of dollars every year attacking us
Evidence? Citation? Or is that just a wild paranoid guess?
The US government spends about $1 trillion every year on its armed forces, weapons, ammunition, the many secret police "agencies", and paying vast numbers of head-chopping, heart-eating terrorists to attack everyone the US government doesn't like.
The USA is far and away the world's biggest spender on "defence" - which of course, in true Orwellian fashion, really means "aggression".
Because everything in the world belongs to Americans, but some damned foreigners just refuse to accept that.
China was the biggest and most powerful nation in the world for many centuries before the USA was created. Its rulers made the apparently unwise decision not to develop their firearms, bombs, rockets, etc. because such weapons could lead to dreadful slaughter and destruction.
They did not expect foreigners from the other side of the world to do what they had chosen not to, allowing them to conquer China - at least some of the coastal regions and Beijing. That, followed by the US-encouraged Japanese invasion, reduced China to the level of a thrid world country for over a century.
In the past 25 years China has begun resuming its rightful position as the world's leading industrial and commercial nation. With the Western nations still violent and ceceitful, China obviously has to arm itself to protect its wealth against further depredations.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently deisgned by nature, whom she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property".
- Thomas Jefferson (who invented lots of things, all of which he freely released for general public use without any request for payment).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's "a nation ruled by laws, not men".
No one ever mentioned women.
Thing is that the sanctions mean that most Western banks are prohibited from providing them with services because they are also present in the USA. That's a lot more problematic.
It simply means that free, independent nations will increasingly make their own arrangements, cutting out the US-controlled banks and institutions entirely. This is already well under way in Russia, China and Iran - and a lot of other countries can see which way the wind is blowing.
If someone potentially hostile is holding your testicles, it is wise to take steps to change the situation. Perhaps by getting someone else to deal the aggressor a smart blow to the head, or - all else failing - by grabbing his nuts, which at least equalizes things.
Further plenty of countries will be happy to arrest them pending extradition to the USA, including pretty much the entire EU [among] others.
Then they simply stay out of those countries, whose numbers are likely to drop rather smartly once they realise the consequences of arbitrarily arresting foreigners without any legal basis. (Just as I suspect we shan't be seeing a lot more Chinese nationals being arrested by Canada or the USA).
They will also be unable to get diplomatic passports for pretty much anywhere now, and if Russia issues false identities to get them diplomatic passports they are invalid and that diplomatic immunity is out the window.
You don't seem to understand how diplomatic passports work. They are issued by a person's own government, like any other passports. If a host nation does not wish to allow entry to a given foreign national - even with a diplomatic passport - that is its right. Of course, denying entry to accredited diplomats is a rather unfriendly move, and would be taken into account in future relations.
Above all, you don't seem to understand that the "new world order" some deranged people in Washington hoped for does not exist. The USA accounts for about 4% of the world's population, and although George Kennan and others resolved in the 1940s to make sure that the USA went on consuming at least 25% of the world's resources, those days are over.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news...
Actually, deliberately spreading false statements in an effort to sway voters one way or another sounds like election meddling to me -- trying to add votes is called fraud, not meddling.
And who is the anointed judge of which statements are true, and which are false?
You, presumably.
Obama and other have claimed that everything was paid back and "the taxpayer made a profit". Well, I doubt if any taxpayers have seen any of the money that was paid back. That will have gone straight into killing people in Asia and Africa, and maybe trying to make the F-35 fly in the rain without killing its pilots.
But what do you mean by "the bank bailouts"? Obama mentioned a few hundred billion - lunch money to the Pentagon. How about $16.8 trillion and counting as of 2015? Who has paid THAT back - and why haven't we heard about it?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...
Meh. Come back when China's average person is as well off as a the US's average person. As a middle class member I'd rather be anywhere in the US than anywhere else in the world from an economic standpoint.
You'd like to live in San Francisco, for instance?
https://media.boingboing.net/w...
https://www.gospelherald.com/d...
Or maybe in a district with open pools of raw sewage?
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/41857...
He's absolutely right. We've spent trillions of dollars destroying and then rebuilding infrastructure for the Taliban and other terrorist organizations while allowing our own to rot.
Half right, half absolutely wrong.
The US government has spent at least $3 trillion since 2001 destroying infrastructure in Asia and Africa.
But it hasn't rebuilt a single thing. Even in Raqqa, which it bombed relentlessly for months, there are still tens of thousands of corpses rotting under the ruins.
See much rebuilding here?
http://a.abcnews.com/images/In...
We have all of these in the U.S.:
Medicare
Medicade
Progressive Income Tax
Social Security
Social Security Disability
Unemployment Insurance
SNAP (Food Stamps)
WIC
What world do you live in where this doesn't resemble socialism?
You forgot bank bailouts. ("Socialism for the rich"). Which cost far more than all the other stuff put together.
Incidentally, state pensions and unemployment insurance were introduced by Bismarck in Germany, 1881-9. Bismarck was not a socialist.
What HAVE we accomplished over there?
Killed over 10 million people - I'm looking at the whole of Asia, optionally with Africa and South America thrown in - since 1945. That's about 2-3 Holocausts, depending on who's counting.
Oh, and overthrown the governments of a few dozen nations, and destroyed their infrastructure.
If you can't make your own people rich, prosperous and happy, why not make everyone else poor, desperate and miserable? (Those who aren't dead).
It's much easier. And, as some people see it, more fun.
Taiwan isn't going to conquer itself, after all.
You foolish person, Taiwan is part of China, just as Crimea is part of Russia - and Hawaii, Alaska, Diego Garcia and Guam are not part of the USA. And the Falkland Islands are not part of Britain.
All you need is a globe, or an Atlas, and the ability to read a map.
ICBM finds you!
Actually, that should read "In continental USA... Russian ICBM finds YOU".
Especially if you are a member of the political elite who believes they can safely start wars in faraway places and never suffer the consequences themselves.
They must have assumed that nobody on the plane spoke English.
That's always a safe bet anywhere in the world nowadays. Especially on airliners. After all, English is just a hole-in-corner minority language of no interest to most people.
But Yandex, Bing, Google and everyone else blurring out the images means there are non-military, non-intelligence-agent people having access to the clear images they later blurr. So you don't know who else has access to those images.
Oh... my... God. So you mean that the taxpayers whose money bought all those ridiculously expensive weapons might learn where they are deployed? My, that is really awful.
And even foreigners!
So... you think punishing officials for corruption is bad? You prefer the American system, where it is legal and widespread?
There is nothing in the article to which you linked that even hints that those imprisoned are political enemies of Mr Xi.
So now In America you have to prove you had NOT committed any crime, rather than the prosecution proving that you had committed a crime?
Well, that is so if you are (A) one of the least privileged 99.9%; or (B) a despised and hated foreigner.
If you are one of the elite, there is hardly a law you cannot break (or, more precisely, ignore) with utter impunity. That's the way the system works, and that's the way it was set up to work back in 1776-94.
“Xi has thrown thousands of political enemies in Jail for fraud and money laundering charges“
See, fixed that for you.
As is traditional on Slashdot, could you give us any evidence for your assertions? Any shred of evidence? Anything at all?
Or is it just "Everyone knows the Chinese are wicked..."?
For more than 100 years Canada and the United States have been partners against all types of dictatorships and evil.. The world is evil. Communist China is evil.
Surely you don't really believe a word of that. At any rate, by posting it you have lost all credibility.
The world is NOT black and white, good versus evil. It contains a lot of people who do very good things, and a lot of people who do very bad things; those people are pretty evenly distributed. Largely, the amount of good or harm an individual does is a matter of opportunity.
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being".
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (“The Gulag Archipelago”)
Then China will go mad
That certainly won't happen. The Chinese are the calmest, most level-header players at the top table. They are about as emotional as a chess (or maybe Go) grandmaster considering her next move.
As I understand it, a US court has ordered the arrest and extradition of a Chinese corporation's CFO on charges of fraud.
Does that mean that Chinese, European and other countries' courts will now be able to arrest and extradite the American executives responsible for the 2008 crash? Between them they caused trillions of dollars of losses worldwide, not a penny of which they paid themselves. Governments had to milk their taxpayers for said trillions in order to "make good" the balance sheets and reserves of supposedly system-critical banks and other financial institutions.
This was the biggest fraud in the history of the world, yet how many executives have been indicted in the USA? https://radiofreethinker.files...
Zero.
“Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men reported that on March 27 2009, just two months after taking office, [Obama] invited the executives of thirteen leading Wall Street institutions to the White House. After listening to their arguments for why banks had to go on paying bonuses (ostensibly to get the best talent to manage their money), Obama told them: ‘Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that’. He explained that only he could provide them with the political shield needed to forestall public pressure for reform, not to mention prosecution of financial fraud. ‘My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks’”.
- Michael Hudson, "Killing the Host", page 253
"TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business".
The big question is: can TSMC produce processor chips without massive gaping security holes? If so, their chances are fair to middling.
"... intended to serve as a 'call to action' to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits..."
An interesting selection of examples, especially if they are meant to correspond to categories of "misinformation".
"Fake news" is a hopelessly meaningless term. As William Randolph Hearst is said to have declared, "News is something someone doesn't want printed. All else is advertizing".
That being so, we can always rely on those who don't want any particular piece of news printed to denounce it as "fake news". Although the scope for such disagreements can be reduced if reporters are careful to stick to the facts, all the facts and nothing but the facts. It's when interpretation and opinion slip in that "news reports" become hopelessly contentious and divisive. It also helps if reporters are always careful to list their sources for all claims. (For example, "in the vicious war between X and Y, today Y cruelly murdered 5,000 tiny helpless children *according to X*" is not very persuasive).
"Flat earthers" probably get little support these days, as belief that the Earth is an oblate spheroid has a great deal of evidence behind it.
"Anti-vaxxers" (presumably meaning people who are concerned that some vaccinations may cause harm) are rather different, as there may well be evidence supporting their position. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity in the issue: which vaccination exactly (or what combination), given to whom under what circumstances?
And then there are the other obvious public issues, such as anthropogenic climate change (and how much it matters), the rights and wrongs of political and geopolitical disagreements, even the strengths and weaknesses of various programming languages...
Surely we should all be "vigilant" for incorrect statements and claims. But it would be wrong to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and condemn reasonable or plausible statements and claims just because they are currently unfashionable.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind".
- John Stuart Mill
Especially as, in the past, the one person has sometimes been right, and the rest of mankind wrong.
I'm looking forward to the epiphany when Western managers and "entrepreneurs" discover that foreigners can do their work far better too.
[Our] adversaries spend billions of dollars every year attacking us
Evidence? Citation? Or is that just a wild paranoid guess?
The US government spends about $1 trillion every year on its armed forces, weapons, ammunition, the many secret police "agencies", and paying vast numbers of head-chopping, heart-eating terrorists to attack everyone the US government doesn't like.
The USA is far and away the world's biggest spender on "defence" - which of course, in true Orwellian fashion, really means "aggression".
Because everything in the world belongs to Americans, but some damned foreigners just refuse to accept that.
the US government doesn't have that kind of contralized control and people would never stand for it.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
China was the biggest and most powerful nation in the world for many centuries before the USA was created. Its rulers made the apparently unwise decision not to develop their firearms, bombs, rockets, etc. because such weapons could lead to dreadful slaughter and destruction.
They did not expect foreigners from the other side of the world to do what they had chosen not to, allowing them to conquer China - at least some of the coastal regions and Beijing. That, followed by the US-encouraged Japanese invasion, reduced China to the level of a thrid world country for over a century.
In the past 25 years China has begun resuming its rightful position as the world's leading industrial and commercial nation. With the Western nations still violent and ceceitful, China obviously has to arm itself to protect its wealth against further depredations.
No such thing as intellectual property.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently deisgned by nature, whom she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property".
- Thomas Jefferson (who invented lots of things, all of which he freely released for general public use without any request for payment).