JAILED FOR A TEXT: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups.

One night this September, construction supervisor Chen Shouli fired off a joke in a chat group.

“Haha,” he typed on his black iPhone 7, followed by an off-color wisecrack about a rumored love triangle involving a celebrity and one of China’s most senior government officials.

Four days later, he says, the police telephoned, ordering him in for questioning.

“I thought, I haven’t done anything wrong, have I? I’m law-abiding,” recalls Mr. Chen, a wiry 41-year-old. “So I went in. Once I arrived, they wouldn’t let me leave.”

Mr. Chen was locked in a cell for five days, he says. According to the police report, his comment on the WeChat messaging app was deemed “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a broad offense that encompasses gang fighting and destruction of public property and is punishable by detention without trial.

In China’s swiftly evolving new world of state surveillance, there are fewer and fewer private spaces. Authorities who once had to use informants to find out what people said in private now rely on a vast web of new technology. They can identify citizens as they walk down the street, monitor their online behavior and snoop on cellphone messaging apps to identify suspected malcontents.

Strong encryption is everyone’s friend — except the tyrant.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: China sues Venezuela’s oil company over unpaid bills.

According to court documents filed on Nov. 27 in Houston, Texas, Sinopec USA claims that PDVSA has failed to pay for half of a $43.5 million order for steel products. The lawsuit was first reported by the Financial Times on Wednesday.

The disputed amount is small when compared to the massive debts Venezuela is struggling to repay.

Venezuela and PDVSA owe more than $60 billion just to bondholders. In total, the country owes $196 billion, according to a paper published by the Harvard Law Roundtable.

China’s state banks loaned $60 billion to Venezuela between 2007 and 2016, and the lawsuit is just the latest sign that Beijing is growing impatient with the embattled South American country.

Even the comradely international socialist brotherhood gets tense when the bills don’t get paid.

PRISON COLONY: Australians Applaud the ‘Erosion of Religious Liberty’ as Same-Sex Marriage Becomes Law.

DIGGING DEEPER: Newly Revealed Experiment Shows How F-35 Could Help Intercept ICBMs.

I covered this one earlier in the week, but the only article I could find was locked tight behind a paywall. This one is free:

The F-35 is studded with sensors like no other aircraft, including the Distributed Aperture System, or DAS, a half-dozen 17-pound electro-optical and infrared sensors. These feed a helmet-mounted display that allows the pilot to effectively “see through the plane” and spot incoming aircraft and missiles.

In October 2014, Northrop and MDA launched FTX-20, an experiment to see, among other things, whether the DAS could track an enemy ICBM. They took data from the sensors, ran it through algorithms developed by Northrop and MDA’s Enterprise Sensor Lab, generated a 3D-moving picture of the missile’s trajectory, and conveyed it over the Link 16 tactical data exchange. This kind of targeting data can help cue the U.S. Navy’s anti-ballistic missile destroyers or short- and intermediate-range missile defenses like the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile battery deployed in South Korea.

The F-35 sensors aren’t meant to replace the infrared satellites that detect launches, or the sea-based X-Band Radar that can feed targeting data about missile launches to destroyers. Rather, Northrop officials said, the DAS data would help the other missile-defense gear get a targeting track on a missile more quickly, improving the odds of nailing the shot. (You also need two of them in the air for triangulation.)

“That information can go straight to the Patriot [missile system], THAAD, or anywhere else, who has communication with that platform,” John “Bama” Montgomery, a business development manager at Northrop’s ISR & Targeting Division, said on Tuesday.

One drawback is that unlike satellite or ground-based radar, two F-35s must be kept within detection range of the launchpad at all times. But the targeting information they could provide would be priceless.

SHE’S LIVING IT: The Upside of Office Flirtation?

Allison Benedikt:

When I was 23 years old, my boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk. I was an entry-level fact-checker at my first magazine job, and he was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the time, was in his hands. Once, when we had finished working on a story together, he suggested we get a drink to celebrate. It was a Friday night, and I remember feeling extremely nervous as we sat across from each other in a dark bar. He was flirting with me, I could tell. The next weekend, he asked me out again. A few days later, he kissed me on the steps of the West 4th subway station without first getting my consent. We’ve now been happily married for 14 years and have three children.

It is an understatement to say something has shifted in the culture. And that shift is unquestionably to the good. Men like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer and their less famous counterparts deserve to be kicked out of polite society, ruined, and, in certain cases, indicted. Women (and men) feel safer coming forward with stories of abuse and are being believed. But a byproduct of these welcome developments has been an expansion of our collective definition of harassment. Reading accounts of others’ experiences since the great outpouring began, I’ve vacillated between horror at the abusive situations so many women have endured and alarm at some of the interactions being considered misconduct. I’ve felt a rift with many of the younger women I know, who claim to understand exactly where to draw the line between legitimate behavior and abuse and seem to view harassment as any interaction with a man that has made them uncomfortable. For all the power of the #MeToo moment, it’s been a bit bewildering too.

It’s necessary — and belatedly satisfying — to expose devils like Weinstein and Rose and Lauer. But before this new normal settles down, it’s likely to take some innocent reputations along with it. To some “feminists,’ that’s a feature, not a bug.

But even after the dust settles down, the new normal may put a permanent kibosh on happy office romances like Benedikt’s.

CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Western Jihadists Who Joined ISIS Fear for Their Lives, Beg to Be Sent Home.

THEY ALL KNEW: Women enable men like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose.

Roxanne Jones:

In some cases, these women are the personal assistants, executives and co-workers who have benefited from the harasser’s success. They’ve gotten promotions, recognition and raises.

They may commiserate with other women in the ladies’ room about the awful boys’ club culture. But if you ever accuse a co-worker of sexual harassment or abuse, the last thing they will do is support you. If they have the power, these women may even fire you for causing a stir.

This week, NBC star Matt Lauer became the most recent man to fall amid sexual harassment allegations, which ranged from castigating a woman for not having sex with him after he dropped his pants in the office to sending women sex toys. On Thursday, Lauer apologized: “… there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed,” he wrote. “I regret that my shame is now shared by the people I cherish dearly,” his statement said.

When his “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie broke the news of Lauer’s firing on air, she was clearly devastated.

Given that Lauer’s proclivities were no secret, that last bit hasn’t gotten nearly the scrutiny it deserves.

SERGEY IS WATCHING YOU: Google Street Views AI Can Now Predict Race and Political Party.

BLUE STATE BLUES: A $40 Toll to Drive 10 Miles? It Happened on Virginia’s I-66.

If you took a bus from New York to Washington tomorrow, a 230-mile drive, and then turned around and came back, you still might not spend as much as some Virginians paid on Tuesday to drive there from 10 miles away.

Just after 8 a.m., the price to take the new express lanes on Interstate 66 from the Beltway to downtown Washington reached $40. By the time the morning rush ended at 9:30, the toll was $15.75 — a comparative pittance, but still almost enough for a one-way ticket from New York.

The peak price — which barreled past the $34.50 recorded on Monday, the lanes’ first day of operation — was one of the highest for a toll road anywhere in the United States. But transit officials said the congestion pricing system was working as designed: keeping traffic moving by encouraging people to car-pool or take alternate routes.

If you’re in a hurry to get to DC, I guess it helps to be a well-paid bureaucrat or lobbyist.

WOW: This Epic 4K Film Captures the Beauty of Lightning at 1,000FPS.

REVANCHISM? Turkey’s Erdogan calls for border treaty review in Greece visit.

Mr Erdogan said the 1923 treaty that settled Turkey’s borders after World War One was not being applied fairly.

But Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos rejected any change to the Treaty of Lausanne.

Relations between the two Nato members have been uneasy for decades.

The 1923 treaty and the resulting population transfers between the two nations was supposed to settle the Greco-Turkish border once and for all, but it never quite worked out that way.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: A Most Remarkable Year.

After a period of sheer disbelief these liberal revolutionaries are now going head to head with the Deplorable rebels. The game’s afoot and nobody can easily call it off.

Which will win has yet to be determined by history. All one can do is compare their present strengths and strategies. In the matter of strength there should be no contest. A survey of federal government employees has the liberals over the Deplorables by almost 19 to 1. Over 99% of Department of Education employees backed Hillary. Trump’s best showing was in the Department of Defense — and even there Hillary had 84% of contributions. Add to this the liberal dominance in the media (93%) and academe (92%) and in Big Silicon, and it should be a case of progressive Goliath walking over conservative David.

Yet for a variety of reasons, the contest is much closer than the liberals could have imagined. Even the term “Resistance” implicitly accepts the status of equality if not actual inferiority. One possible explanation for the surprising competitiveness is the existence of some weakness which prevents liberals from generating their nominal power potential. In fact, the inability of the Resistance to generate net thrust is indirect confirmation that the toxic lying, wasteful spending, institutional incompetence, and ideological madness of which they have been accused are at least partially true.

Though they won’t admit it, they’ve realized this. This quiet acceptance has driven their strategy. The Resistance’s need to rid itself of weakness explains the choice of rectification, also known as purge, as a major activity. Purges have traditionally been used by “progressive” movements to rid themselves of “undesirables.” In 2017 the purge took two forms. The first was directed against the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and the second became a vigorous, almost hysterical campaign against sexual predators in liberal ranks. The need to clear the decks was so great that even liberal politicians like Al Franken and John Conyers find themselves reclassified as expendable.

Read the whole thing.

AND ANOTHER ONE DOWN: Former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. Fired For Misconduct By Morgan Stanley.

In two interviews with HuffPost, the woman alleged that Ford engaged in harassment, intimidation, and forcibly grabbed her one evening in Manhattan, leading her to seek aid from a building security guard. The incident took place several years ago when Ford and the woman were supposed to be meeting for professional reasons. Ford continued to contact her after the encounter until she wrote an email asking him to cease contact.

The email, which was reviewed by HuffPost, shows that the woman emailed Ford after he repeatedly asked her to drinks. She asked him not to contact her anymore, citing his inappropriate conduct the evening where he forcibly grabbed and harassed her. Ford replied to the email by apologizing and agreeing not to contact her.

HuffPost is not identifying the woman at her request but has reviewed emails that confirm her interactions with Ford and spoke to two people whom the woman confided in about the incident. One woman heard from Ford’s accuser the night of the incident and described her as “distraught, shocked, and frightened,” and said that she was concerned about any career ramifications should she report the incident.

Ford comes from a prominent political family in Tennessee. His father, Harold Ford Sr., held a congressional seat for 12 terms before retiring, leaving his son to run for the seat, a race which he won handily.

As the wise man said, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.”

ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVE: What’s Driving Walmart’s Digital Focus? Paranoia, Top Exec Says.

For quite some time, Walmart, No. 1 on Fortune’s Global 500 list of the world’s largest companies with $486 billion in sales last year, has been working to adjust its strategy to reckon with the threat posed by Amazon.com.

The so-called Everything Store had more than 50% of all online retail sales in the U.S. last year and continues to expand at a blistering pace. With its acquisition earlier this year of Whole Foods, Amazon served notice that it is bringing the fight for consumers to Walmart on its own turf—physical stores. Amazon’s market value has risen above $550 billion, significantly above Walmart’s stock market value of around $290 billion despite strong returns for Walmart’s shares this year.

In China, Walmart now has another potent competitor getting into the stores business: Chinese online retail titan Alibaba.

Alibaba announced in November that it was investing $2.9 billion to acquire a 36% stake in Chinese hypermarket operator Sun Art, which has some 400 stores in China similar in scale to Walmart’s superstores. As with Amazon and Whole Foods, Alibaba plans to create a connected retail experience for shoppers between their smartphones and their neighborhood stores.

It’s the same strategy Walmart is pursuing, but in reverse: Amazon and Alibaba want to bring their huge customer bases into stores; Walmart wants to persuade the shoppers who frequent its nearly 12,000 stores globally to do more of their digital shopping with Walmart as well.

Walmart’s online experience is much improved, but Amazon still enjoys amazing customer lock-in with its combination of Prime membership and one-click ordering.

BUT I HAS THE FEELZ: Law Professor Requires Students to ‘Cluck Like a Chicken’ if They Say ‘I Feel.’

76 YEARS AGO TODAY: 32 historical photos of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Several of these are new to me, including a rare color photo of the effort to save a crewman from the burning USS West Virginia.

OH: North Korea says nuclear war on Korean Peninsula inevitable.

A nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is inevitable because of threatening military drills by South Korea and the United States, North Korea’s foreign ministry said in comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency late Wednesday.

The foreign ministry said the military exercises involving hundreds of South Korean and U.S warplanes made the outbreak of war an “established fact.” It also blamed high-ranking U.S. officials, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, for “bellicose remarks.”

Pompeo said Saturday that U.S. intelligence agencies believe North Korean leader Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a good idea about how tenuous his situation is domestically and internationally as he pushes ahead with North Kore[a]’s nuclear weapons program.

Indeed. Violent, unpredictable, and now armed with nukes, the Kim Regime is no longer the kind of neighbor China can tolerate having right across the Yalu River.

TECH WARS: Inside Oracle’s cloak-and-dagger political war with Google.

The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones.

But missing from the news site’s report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google’s fiercest foes: Oracle.

For the past year, the software and cloud computing giant has mounted a cloak-and-dagger, take-no-prisoners lobbying campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain at a time when the two tech giants are also warring in federal court over allegations of stolen computer code.

Since 2010, Oracle has accused Google of copying Java and using key portions of it in the making of Android. Google, for its part, has fought those claims vigorously. More recently, though, their standoff has intensified. And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.

To be sure, the substance of Quartz’s story — Google’s errant location tracking — checks out. Google itself acknowledged the mishap and said it ceased the practice. Nor does Oracle stand alone in raising red flags about Google at a time when many in the nation’s capital are questioning the power and reach of large web platforms.

Still, Oracle’s campaign is undeniable.

A fascinating tale of corporate skullduggery — read the whole thing.

BRUCE BAWER: The Courage of Larry David.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Amazon will cause rogue delivery drones to have a controlled self destruct.

The use of UAVs is accompanied by the need for new solutions to various problems, such as service disruptions due to unsuitable weather conditions, equipment malfunctions, and other problems.

In that context, various embodiments related to the fragmentation of UAVs are described. In one case, a UAV includes various parts or components, such one or more motors, batteries, sensors, a housing, casing or shell, and a shipping container or other payload for delivery. Additionally, the UAV includes a flight controller and a fragmentation controller. The flight controller determines a flight path and controls a flight operation of the UAV for delivery of the payload.

While the UAV is in-flight, the fragmentation controller develops and updates a fragmentation sequence. Among other information, the fragmentation sequence includes a release timing and a release location to fragment away (e.g., release, drop, jettison, eject, etc. away) one or more UAV components in case the flight operation of the UAV is disrupted. The fragmentation sequence can be evaluated and updated over time based on the flight path of the UAV, the ongoing flight conditions for the UAV, and the terrain topology over which the UAV is flying, among other factors. Terrain topology information or data can identify certain preferred locations for dropping one or more of the components of the UAV. For example, the terrain topology information can identify bodies of water, forested areas, open fields, and other locations more suitable for dropping components of the UAV if or when flight operation errors, malfunctions, or unexpected conditions occur.

What the article doesn’t describe is what happens to the package.

YA THINK? Forcing kid to masturbate for cops in sexting case was wrong, court finds.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: RUSSIA Collusion Update, Israel Fallout and Much, Much More.

MIDEAST: Saudi Arabia’s Earth-Shaking Coup.

How extraordinary to see a world-historical revolution unfolding before one’s eyes and not know how it will turn out: that’s what’s happening right now in Saudi Arabia. Mohammad bin Salman, a 32-year-old too young to be a partner in most law or finance firms, has managed, by intrigue not yet fully disclosed, to supplant his cousin Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef as heir to the throne and to carry out a purge of the royal family breathtaking in its sweep. Imagine: not only did bin Salman order the arrest of at least ten other princes and a score of former government ministers, now held in luxurious restraint in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton; he also supposedly had Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men and a major shareholder of 21st Century Fox, Citigroup, Apple, Twitter, and a host of other giant Western corporations, hanged upside down and beaten in an “anti-corruption” investigation.

No matter that “wasta”—corruption, kickbacks, and cronyism—has long governed Saudi Arabian business dealings. Now, the kingdom’s economic crown jewel—Aramco, the Saudi state oil company—is headed for sale on the public stock markets, and the financial future of the kingdom and its oligarchs is on the line. Sadly for the Saudis, Aramco is no longer as valuable, economically and geopolitically, as it once was. Natural gas from fracking has displaced oil as the fuel of the Western economy, with the result that OPEC (and, less critically, Russian oil) can no longer hold anybody’s economy hostage. For the Saudi government, moreover, no longer can cartel-inflated oil revenues pay for the gigantic welfare state that supports so much of the population in non–working, gilded, state dependency. What can’t go on, won’t, said economist Herb Stein sagely; and MbS, as the new crown prince is called, saw this reality and stepped in to take precautionary measures before a rapidly collapsing economic order sparked social anarchy, with an outcome no government could foresee or control.

Read the whole thing.

Bin Salman faces serious headwinds — violent Wahhabi hardliners, frustrated members of his own ruling clan, and of course the ticking time bomb effect of low oil prices on his country’s finances.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Porn Star May Have Committed Suicide Over Twitter Bullying.

On December 3, Ames, who has over 280 movie credits to her name, tweeted her personal decision not to shoot with male porn actors who’ve shot gay porn, and a warning to another performer.

“Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me for @EroticaXNews, you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know,” [sic] she wrote on Twitter. “BS is all I can say. Do agents really not care about who they’re representing? #ladirect I do my homework for my body.”

The 23-year-old porn star was referring to the higher instances of sexually transmitted diseases in gay porn actors, which is a constant danger for porn performers. The Daily Beast reported in 2016 that the porn industry has done a poor job of protecting its stars from contracting diseases like HIV.

Following Ames’ tweet, the performer was bombarded with accusations of homophobia by a number of other adult industry actors.

According to the Blast, Ames’ death was confirmed by the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office today. Her friends suspect that she committed suicide due to the bullying on Twitter. Sources told the publication that Ames suffered from long-term depression and that the incident may have contributed to her decision to take her own life.

Twitter apparently allows this kind of cyberbullying, while banning award-winning journalist Bridget Johnson without notification or explanation.

BUT OF COURSE: Professors Refer to Conservative Criticism as ‘Violence.’