Official and quasi-official Chinese pronouncements carry the ring of prophesy. In the heyday of socialism, the Party forecasted the size of the following year’s harvests and the quantity of steel production, and the final numbers were rarely permitted to deviate much from the predictions.
.. In recent years, two-thirds of China’s new investors have been individuals who do not have a high-school diploma. With the property market weakening and few other reliable investment options available, the stock market looked like a good bet, and banks permitted people to take out loans to buy even more shares.
.. Since stepping into office, in 2012, President Xi has offered his people a harsh but tantalizing bargain. He has arrested thousands of people for political activism (including, this week,many human-rights lawyers) or for corruption; at the same time, he has signalled to the rest of the population that, if it can avoid those minefields, it will be free to pursue the “Chinese Dream”—his recipe of prosperity, pride in China’s rise, and a menu of state-sanctioned freedoms, including travel and entertainment. It is, a marketer might say, a value proposition based on performance, and a stock-market collapse would have imperilled the deal—and so it was halted.
The Agency: Russian Trolls
Forbes Russia reported that Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources. According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism “actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism.” Or, as Forbes put it, “Prism sees social media as a battlefield.”
.. Putin gave ideological cover to the crackdown by calling the entire Internet a “C.I.A. project,” one that Russia needed to be protected from.
.. All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition.
.. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.
.. During the protests, a favorite tactic of the opposition was making anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Today, waves of trolls and bots regularly promote pro-Putin hashtags. What once was an exhilarating act of popular defiance now feels empty. “It kind of discredited the idea of political hashtags ..
Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the ‘pathetic’ American media
He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.
.. He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.
.. “I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he says.
The Detail in Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story That Rings True
Hersh’s scenario explains one detail that has always nagged me about the night of Bin Laden’s death.
After one of the SEALs’ Black Hawk helicopters crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, neighbors called the police and reported hearing both the crash and the subsequent explosions. The local police told me that they received the calls and could have been at the compound within minutes, but army commanders ordered them to stand down and leave the response to the military. Yet despite being barracked nearby, members of the Pakistani Army appear to have arrived only after the SEALs — who spent 40 minutes on the ground without encountering any soldiers — left.