Confined to Stall,
Your Role As A Milk Cow (A clarification for beginners looks at how inflation is used to manipulate perceptions and economic behaviors. Compound interest, the financial capitalist's tour de force is not expounded upon.)
https://internationalman.com/
Twelve Tips for Making Sense of the World":
Nafta provides a perfect illustration of why all trade treaties should contain a sunset clause. Provisions that made sense to the negotiators in the early 1990s make no sense to anyone today, except fossil fuel companies and greedy lawyers... Under Nafta, these provisions have become, metaphorically and literally, toxic. When Canada tried to ban a fuel additive called MMT as a potentially dangerous neurotoxin, the US manufacturer used Nafta rules to sue the government. Canada was forced to lift the ban, and award the company $13m (£10m) in compensation. ... As the US justice department woke up to the implications of these rules in the 1990s, it began to panic: one official wrote that it “could severely undermine our system of justice” and grant foreign companies “more rights than Americans have” ... The Canadian government cannot adhere to both its commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change and its commitments under Nafta. While the Paris commitments are voluntary, Nafta’s are compulsory... Trump was right to spike the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He is right to demand a sunset clause for Nafta. When this devious, hollow, self-interested man offers a better approximation of the people’s champion than any other leader, you know democracy is in trouble.
Twelve Tips for Making Sense of the World":
Caitlin Johnstone is speaking in tongues of the Holy Ghost here!
https://medium.com/@
1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.
2. Money rewards sociopathy.
3. Wealth kills empathy.
4. Money is power.
5. This same ruling class controls the media.
6. People are always manipulating each other.
7. Society is made of narrative.
8. The lines between nations are imaginary.
9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests.
10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict.
11. The neocons are always wrong.
12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself.
https://medium.com/@
1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.
2. Money rewards sociopathy.
3. Wealth kills empathy.
4. Money is power.
5. This same ruling class controls the media.
6. People are always manipulating each other.
7. Society is made of narrative.
8. The lines between nations are imaginary.
9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests.
10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict.
11. The neocons are always wrong.
12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself.
More Caitlin: “President Trump seems to have given away two or three of the major things that Kim Jong-Un wanted,” Schumer complained at the aforementioned press conference. “A meeting. The flags next to each other. Now a delay of exercises with South Korea, without getting anything in return.” Huh? A meeting? Flags next to each other? ...
The body language of the Trump-Kim Summit is analyzed here:
“Whenever they’re shaking hands, you can see the whites of their fingertips - these two guys are alpha males,” Leong said.
“They both want to show dominance and that is why there’s this bone-crushing handshake.”
However, Leong said both found it difficult to conceal their nervousness once they were seated, with Trump displaying a slanted smile, and fidgeting with his hands and Kim leaning and staring at the ground.
“They both want to show dominance and that is why there’s this bone-crushing handshake.”
However, Leong said both found it difficult to conceal their nervousness once they were seated, with Trump displaying a slanted smile, and fidgeting with his hands and Kim leaning and staring at the ground.
Yanis Varoufakis analyzes the Trumpian objectives at the recent G(7-1) Meeting in Northern, North America:
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Trump takes one look at all this and concludes that, if the US can no longer stabilise global capitalism, he might as well blow up existing multilateral conventions and build from scratch a new global order resembling a wheel, with America its hub and all other powers its spokes – an arrangement of bilateral deals that ensures the US will always be the largest partner in each, and thus be able to exact a pound of flesh through divide and rule tactics.
"
In Germany, the influence of the automobile industry over the government is legendary. What isn’t are the relatively high tariffs American manufacturers face when exporting to Europe and the low tariffs America itself imposes on automobile imports. What is also ironic is that modern-day protectionism didn’t start with Trump. Barriers against global trade increased between 2009 and 2016. The World Trade Organization warned, year after year, since 2010, about the increase in protectionism. The Obama administration, faced with the exponential increase in its trade deficit, was the one that introduced the highest number of protectionist measures between 2009 and 2016. The only difference between Trump and Obama was that Obama didn’t publicize this much and the mainstream media didn’t complain. (So Trump called everybody else's hand at the G-7. Trade war.)
Unless the European Banking System goes through major adjustment, which is not politically possible (yet) the Eurozone must break up. All the money keeps moving in the same direction, with no way to complete a loop. Germany backs all the debt of southern Europe, and it gets more and more and more.
Russia can finally run a gas pipeline through North Korea, to South Korea, and possibly over to Japan from there, with all parties "winning".
The peace talks, if successful, could revive talks about an onshore gas pipeline, with a capacity of up to 10 Bcm/year via North Korea to the south of the peninsula, which was shelved in 2012 on major political risks. Russia's Gazprom and state-owned South Korean Gas Corp., or Kogas, first agreed to a 30-year supply of up to 10 Bcm/year of Russian gas in 2008, with startup initially marked for 2015 and then delayed to 2017.
Chinese Government mouthpiece, Xinhua says this (mastery of the art of understatement):
A pressing issue to be addressed at the moment is to translate the current hard-earned detente into a long-lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula by properly accommodating concerns of all parties.
To that end, the "dual-track" approach advocated by China, which seeks denuclearization alongside establishing a peace regime on the peninsula, has proven to be a practical and reasonable solution.
A pressing issue to be addressed at the moment is to translate the current hard-earned detente into a long-lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula by properly accommodating concerns of all parties.
To that end, the "dual-track" approach advocated by China, which seeks denuclearization alongside establishing a peace regime on the peninsula, has proven to be a practical and reasonable solution.
It's still hotly debated what "ending expensive war games in South Korea" will mean in practice, but professionals in government say that it will probably just be those big scary massed troop movements with nuclear bombers, that pretend to destroy North Korea, that will be sidelined, not routine training.
Clarified: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the United States will not hold war games with South Korea while North Korea negotiates in good faith on denuclearization.
Trying to nail down exactly what Trump said again... The report from the Korean Central News Agency, which was published after Kim returned home from his meeting, noted Trump’s vow to suspend U.S. military drills in South Korea. It also said Trump committed to unspecified “security guarantees” for Pyongyang, and to “lift sanctions against it.” ... Trump himself indicated some wiggle room, saying sanctions relief could come even before the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” -- however that’s ultimately defined by both sides -- is verified. “I hope it’s going to be soon,” he said Tuesday at an hour-long briefing. “At a certain point, I actually look forward to taking them off.” ... Trump faces Japanese pressure to keep sanctions in place, and a push by China to lift them. A Chinese official already signaled the country may ask the United Nations to lift or adjust the penalties, the basis for the “maximum pressure” campaign Trump has used to push Kim toward disarmament. China, as North Korea’s neighbor and most important trading partner, also could provide relief to Kim by throttling down sanctions enforcement on its own.
The genocide in Yemen steps up, now that it is summer, the time of maximum stress on human bodies. There is famine from the blockade of all food from the port of Hudaydah, the only port to supply food and medicine to people who got 90% of their food through that channel before. The UAE just got the green light from the US to attack and wipe out these starving people with cholera, diptheria, and contaminated water this summer, over a million people...
Saudis see the Zaidiya (Islamic sect) as an impediment of their influence in Yemen. They want to control the Yemeni government. The Emirates want to control the port of Aden and Yemen's oil and gas loading facilities. The Obama administration supported the Saudi onslaught on Yemen to buy Saudi acquiescence with the nuclear deal with Iran. The Trump administration supports the Saudi/UAE war out of lack of knowledge. It has fallen for the Iran myth. It also wants to sell more weapons.
This year’s Bilderberg summit is a council of war. On the agenda: Russia and Iran. In the conference room: the secretary general of Nato, the German defence minister, and the director of the French foreign intelligence service, DGSE... The clearest indication that some sort of US-led conflict is on the cards is the presence of the Pentagon’s top war-gamer, James H Baker. He is an expert in military trends, and no trend is more trendy in the world of battle strategy than artificial intelligence. Bilderberg is devoting a whole session to AI this year – and has invited military theorist Michael C Horowitz, who has written extensively on its likely impact on the future of war. Horowitz sees AI as “the ultimate enabler”. In an article published just a few weeks ago in the Texas National Security Review, he quotes Putin’s remark from 2017: “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” Horowitz says “China, Russia, and others are investing significantly in AI to increase their relative military capabilities”, because it offers “the ability to disrupt US military superiority”. Global military domination is suddenly up for grabs.
Let me point out that using Artificial Intelligence to destroy enough of the people, cities, factories and ecosystem of the world, to declare "victory" is NOT INTELLIGENT, so there are inherent limits to how powerful such programming can be. Also, it has to be completely controlled by the programmers, not self-teaching, because self-teaching things reach their own logical conclusions, which is not what the ruling elites are buying this summer, or ever.
The real promise of Artificial Intelligence is realized when it solves a problem with autonomy. This is illustrated by the Program AlphaGo Zero, the most expert player of the ancient Chinese game of strategy, Go. An earlier computer program was taught to beat the best human masters of the game, but AlphaGo Zero was only programmed with the rules of the game, and a description of what winning was, and began playing itself games. It became better and better as it played, and developed deep and elegant strategies which are not understood, even with watching them. It cannot "explain" what it does. It does it faster, with far fewer internal processing steps, having had no teacher. Our intelligence is sort of a useful byproduct of being a social animal species with thumbs, that was able to adapt to a wide variety of habitats, using fire, speech, and other tools, to enable procreation and biological survival.
"Last Exit to The Road Less Traveled" looks at the inevitability of total destruction of all local ecosystems which are touched by global financial-capitalism. It is impossible to compete against. It is so efficient at bringing everything to "market" at the lowest price, that everything in any one ecosystem goes away to market, and the system is subsumed, wholly consumed, and becomes a memory. This is the form of intelligence of the capitalist model, now approaching it's ultimate victory.
I wonder if Artificial Intelligence could be used in a global forum, to devise economic relations that would meet all common needs of living creatures, and gradually restore living, complex ecosystems over time. It would need to be a "fair-broker" to all life forms, while not posing a "threat" to the life forms calling the shots (see Bilderbergers above). They would need to be desperate enough, to give up selfish hopes of winning, or maybe they could just be outsmarted...
Fellow Traveler
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