Infowars.com
November 28, 2013
You can’t fight back if you don’t know you are under attack.
This article was posted: Thursday, November 28, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Tags: domestic news
Alex Jones: The Stealth Invasion
Showing posts with label stealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stealth. Show all posts
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Friday, November 22, 2013
China Unveils ‘Sharp Sword’ in New Stealth Test Flight
By Shepard Ambellas | November 22, 2013 | 12:52pm EDT
China has been stepping up their military advancements, most recently with the successful test of “Sharp Sword”
China’s new drone “Sharp Sword” took a 5 minute test flight Thursday.
CHINGDU, CHINA (INTELLIHUB) – China has completed its first test flight of ”Sharp Sword”, an all new stealth drone that accents to their newly advanced military arsenal as they seek to become a major military force in the world today. The drone was fully manufactured inside China and has been considered a success after a 5 minute test flight.
The new stealth drone will add to a new line of advanced military equipment.
However, according to reports, “China’s airpower advancements have raised tension with Japan”.
Some question the level of technology displayed in the new drone.
China plans to inject a vast amount of money into its military development in coming years.
China also added the J31 Stealth Fighter to its collection earlier this year along with a new aircraft carrier and a massive transport jet capable of carrying and deploying large numbers of troops and equipment.
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China Unveils ‘Sharp Sword’ in New Stealth Test Flight
Monday, September 30, 2013
The 10 Stealth Economic Trends That Rule the World Today
REUTERS
What’s going on in the world today? It’s hard to keep up. Some facts are familiar to anyone who reads the news. Unemployment is high. Growth is slow. Shale gas is a big deal. But beyond the caps-lock headlines, subtler, but no less significant, shifts are changing the U.S. economy and reshaping the global financial order. Here are ten that have surprised—and might surprise.
1) Old Trend: Expensive solar, surviving only on subsidies.
New Trend: Cheap solar, disrupting old industries.
Since the 1970s, it has become a cliché that solar power is an expensive boondoggle, kept alive only by government subsidies. But every cliché is right until the day it’s suddenly wrong. And for solar, that day is today. Since Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president, the price of solar cells has fallen over 99 percent. No, that’s not a typo. And the exponential cost drop shows no sign of slowing down, with dozens of new technologies in the pipeline. Installation and land costs are falling too. What this means is that in sunny states like Arizona, solar can already compete with fossil fuel electricity even with zero government subsidies. In fact, rooftop solar panels are becoming so popular that utility companies are trying to tax solar power in order to pay for grid maintenance! The technology that was a punch line for decades is about to launch an energy revolution, and most people aren’t even paying attention.
2. Old Trend: The Latinization of America.
New Trend: The Asiafication of America.
“The huge boom in Mexican immigration is over.” The improving Mexican economy, the U.S. construction bust, and increased enforcement have combined to bring net Mexican immigration to zero or negative since 2008. That bears repeating: On net, Mexicans are no longer moving to the United States at all. So who is? Lots of people, but Asians more than anyone. Asians are moving here at a rate of about half a million a year, and the Asian-American percentage of the population has already reached 6%. Most studies say immigration is good for the economy, so this is good news, especially because many of the new Asian arrivals are high-skilled, entrepreneurial types who will start businesses and hire the rest of us.
3. Old Trend: The Chinese population bomb.
New Trend: The Chinese population bust.
In 2012, the working-age population of China fell by 3.45 million. In other words, last year China lost a number of workers approximately equal to the entire population of Lebanon. This year the drop will be bigger, and the drops will accelerate through the 2030s. That means that China’s inexhaustible supply of cheap labor is going to be exhausted a lot faster than most people expected. Nor will repealing the infamous one-child policy cause a Chinese baby boom – in some small areas where it was repealed, fertility rates remain below the national average. This population crunch won’t put that huge of a dent in China’s billion-strong workforce, but it will boost investment in a lot of other poor countries, and will force China’s industries to move up the value chain very quickly, or risk the “middle income trap”.
4. Old Trend: Soaring U.S. CO2 emissions.
New Trend: Plummeting U.S. CO2 emissions.
Thanks a little bit to economic stagnation but mostly to the boom in natural gas, the U.S. – the only large rich country not to sign the Kyoto Protocol – has seen its CO2 emissions tumble to levels not seen since the early 1990s. More drops are expected to follow. Global emissions (i.e. what really matters) continue to soar, but China is the main driver now. The U.S. is subtracting from total emissions now. Of course, that doesn’t count methane emissions, which are released when natural gas is fracked. But the United States is no longer the global carbon badboy it was in the 90s.
5. Old Trend: College is becoming more and more important.
New Trend: College is no more important than before.
If you want a good job, go to college. This has been a maxim of American life since the 1980s, when the “college premium” – the extra income boost from going to college – started to soar into the stratosphere. But an interesting thing has happened in the last decade and a half – the college premium has stagnated. College is still valuable, but its value is no longer increasing. That may be one of the reasons why American college enrollment declined last year. Expect that to put a damper on skyrocketing college tuition and soaring student loans.
6. Old Trend: Americans drive more and more.
New Trend: Americans drive less and less.
Remember when gas cost a buck a gallon? If so, congratulations, you’re old. With gas costs more-or-less permanently at $ 4, Americans are finally adjusting their lifestyles, driving less and less even as unemployment falls. Meanwhile, rail traffic is up, with Amtrak logging a 55% gain since 1997. As we ditch our cars and hop on trains, expect an increasing number of Americans to discover the freedom that rail travel offers.
7. Old Trend: Skyrocketing health care costs, skyrocketing deficits.
New Trend: Creeping health care costs, creeping deficits.
Health care costs and the national debt are drowning the nation, right? Well, maybe, but the water isn’t rising nearly as fast as in the 00s. Health care costs are still outpacing economic growth, but they are doing so at a slower pace, thanks perhaps to the imminent start of Obamacare. Meanwhile, the percentage of health sector jobs is finally falling as a percent of the total. As for that big, bad deficit, it’s fallen by more than half since 2009, and this quarter the federal government actually intends to pay back a tiny bit of the debt. Of course, for those who think that austerity is bad for the economy, this is bad news, but Americans who are worried about the national debt can breathe a little easier.
8. Old Trend: BRICs conquering the world.
New Trend: China is the only BRIC in the wall.
Remember the BRICs? Those new rising super-economies that were going to eclipse the old guard of America, Europe, and Japan? Well, most of them have hit a BRIC wall. Russia, Brazil, and India, tigers of the 2000s, have slowed to 2 or 3% growth – about the same rate as the rich countries. China is the last BRIC standing; although it has experienced a mild slowdown, it is still powering ahead at a robust 7.5% rate. Instead of the rise of a new economic order, we should be talking only about the rise of China.
9. Old Trend: Active management rules the finance universe.
New Trend: Passive investment rules the finance universe.
The number one way that the finance industry makes its money is by collecting fees from people in order to manage their money. Pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, endowment funds…it seems like every dollar you save gets a hefty cut as it passes through the hands of middleman after middleman. And they can’t all beat the market, can they? But America’s love affair with money managers may be going lukewarm, as more and more investors move their wealth into passive management. Passive management means piggybacking on the wisdom of the market instead of paying one pro big bucks to try to out-guess the other pros. Exchange Traded Funds, offered by companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard, are one of the main passive investment vehicles that have emerged in recent years. Meanwhile, some big pension funds are turning to passive management. This could be the dawn of a new, laid-back financial age.
10) Old Trend: China is buying up all our debt.
New Trend: China is selling off our debt.
America has mortgaged ourselves to the Chinese! …Or have we? Our biggest foreign creditor, the Chinese government, is now selling U.S. bonds instead of buying them. Actually, so is our second-biggest foreign creditor, Japan. So who is buying Uncle Sam’s debt? Regular Americans like you and me. Most of the national debt is money we Americans owe to each other, not to foreigners, and this is becoming more true, not less.
So there you have it: Some good, some bad, but overall it’s just a weird new world out there. A lot of what I thought I “knew” a year ago has turned out to be wrong. So stay tuned; more big changes are sure to come.
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The 10 Stealth Economic Trends That Rule the World Today
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Bits: Stealth Wear Aims to Make a Tech Statement
Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com
“Stealth wear” makes a countersurveillance fashion statement. Hoodies made of reflective fabric are intended to reduce one’s thermal footprint.
THE term “stealth wear” sounded cool, if a bit extreme, when I first heard it early this year. It’s a catchy description for clothing and accessories designed to protect the wearer from detection and surveillance. I was amused. It seemed like an updated version of a tinfoil hat, albeit a stylish one.
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Adam Harvey and DIF Magazine
The CV Dazzle hairstyling and makeup program aims to camouflage a person’s face.
Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com
A purse fitted with an electronic device reacts to a camera’s flash with lights so bright that the subject’s face is obscured.
Fast-forward a few months. Flying surveillance cameras, also known as drones, are increasingly in the news. So are advances in facial-recognition technology. And wearable devices like Google Glass — which can be used to take photographs and videos and upload them to the Internet within seconds — are adding to the fervor. Then there are the disclosures of Edward Snowden, the fugitive former government contractor, about clandestine government surveillance.
It’s enough to make countersurveillance fashion as timely and pertinent as any seasonal trend, like midriff tops or wedge sneakers.
Adam Harvey, an artist and design professor at the School of Visual Arts and an early creator of stealth wear, acknowledges that countersurveillance clothing sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel.
“The science-fiction part has become a reality,” he said, “and there’s a growing need for products that offer privacy.”
Mr. Harvey exhibited a number of his stealth-wear designs and prototypes in an art show this year in London. His work includes a series of hoodies and cloaks that use reflective, metallic fabric — like the kind used in protective gear for firefighters — that he has repurposed to reduce a person’s thermal footprint. In theory, this limits one’s visibility to aerial surveillance vehicles employing heat-imaging cameras to track people on the ground.
He also developed a purse with extra-bright LEDs that can be activated when someone is taking unwanted pictures; the effect is to reduce an intrusive photograph to a washed-out blur. In addition, he created a guide for hairstyling and makeup application that might keep a camera from recognizing the person beneath the elaborate get-up. The technique is called CV Dazzle — a riff on “computer vision” and “dazzle,” a type of camouflage used during World War II to make it hard to detect the size and shape of warships.
Mr. Harvey isn’t the only one working on such products. The National Institute of Informatics in Japan has developed a visor outfitted with LEDs whose light isn’t visible to the wearer — but that would blind some camera sensors and blur the details of a wearer’s nose and eyes more effectively than a pair of sunglasses.
And Todd Blatt, a mechanical engineer in New York, is working on a lens-cap accessory for people who don’t want to be recorded while talking with someone who is wearing Google Glass. Instead of asking that the computer glasses be removed entirely, they could instead hand the wearer the lens covering. Presto. No taping or photographing would occur during the conversation.
Mr. Harvey likened his work and that of others to the invention of the rivet in denim jeans. “That was a practical way of making them more durable,” he said. Stealth wear, he said, is an “updated way of thinking about making your clothes more resistant to your environment and adapting them to protect you a little bit more.”
But these designers face a challenge: although technology has inspired some new fabrics and materials, high-tech fashion of any kind has yet to really take off.
There simply isn’t much of a market for tech-savvy haute couture, said Becky Stern, an artist and the director of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries, a company in New York that sells do-it-yourself electronics kits. Ms. Stern noted that a few years ago, clothing embedded with illuminated lights was relatively popular, but that interest later “kind of fell off.”
Some of the most exciting experimentation is in the world of sports, she said, where athletic wear is being developed that can monitor a player’s vital signs. Such products are commercially viable, she said, and the technology could eventually migrate to clothing designed specifically to protect the privacy of its owner.
Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights at Frog Design, says he sees tremendous potential for an eventual stealth-wear market. He described current prototypes as “provocations,” saying they raise “issues that are impacting our cities and public spaces that need more discussion and debate.”
Mr. Harvey’s items have not yet been thoroughly tested by intelligence firms or security experts. Most are still concepts, not ready for mass production. But he said he hoped that awareness of his designs might “empower you to control your identity a little more.”
AND the mere fact that such designs are attracting attention online could pave the way for development of a mass market, said Joanne McNeil, a writer who covers Internet culture.
On her blog “Internet of Dreams,” Ms. McNeil says that videos and mock-ups of not-yet-developed products, whether clothing or futuristic smartphones, are often popular online and may reflect the desires of a populace that larger corporations haven’t tapped.
“Dreams outpace physical realities,” she said.
In other words, even if stealth wear never becomes a viable or commercial reality, the newfound intrusiveness it responds to is genuine enough.
Bits: Stealth Wear Aims to Make a Tech Statement
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