Dining Lightly,
As you've heard, North Korea showed what they said was an H-bomb, compact and powerful, and ready to fly away on an ICBM, with an ICBM mate for it. Then North Korea successfully tested their H-bomb underground, 10 times as powerful as the A-bomb they tested last time. President Trump declares that North Korea "only understands force", and that this display "embarrasses China". (Are we negotiating yet?)
"While the North bragged about the weapon’s “great destructive power” in a TV broadcast, what caught analysts’ attention was a mention of a different tactic: detonating an H-bomb at high altitude to create an electromagnetic pulse that could knock out parts of the US electrical grid."
After the July 4, 2017 North Korean ICBM tests, Russia and China together proposed a negotiation to end the Korean War (still ticking...). The US would stop massive military drills, aimed at attacking North Korea (currently underway), and North Korea would stop testing nukes and missiles, then all involved parties would sit down to negotiate an end to the Korean War. (This perfectly sensible proposal is a slap in the face to American exceptionalism, of course.)
Turkey a critical crossroad for oil, gas, shipping and other trade, is escaping the gravity of NATO orbit. That CIA/Mossad coup attempt last year, thwarted by Russian tip-off, backfired. Thanks Eleni.
It was that failed coup, likely engineered by the United States, which began Turkey’s public shift away from NATO and into further alliance with Russia, Iran and the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
More from Eleni: Israel really went overboard in attempts to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, and now pretends to be so afraid of Iranian troops in Syria, who are not at all equipped to attack anything but ISIS, certainly not the Israeli military machine. Netanyahu's pressured visit to Sochi, with Mossad Chief, is further explored here. Putin was implacable.
"Moscow is telling the truth when it claims that it is not only concerned about Israel’s security, it is also prepared to guarantee it. But that security has to be real, not pretend... After all, it has more than once been explained to Prime Minister Netanyahu that the Iranian troops will depart once the war in Syria ends. That’s even what Tehran is saying."
Lest we lose the overall context of our current world, let us recall that we live in the seat of an empire, wherein the destruction of the lives and property of citizens on 9/11/2001 was used as a shock pretext for an unlimited "Global War on Terror", which just means global war on everybody, obviously including Americans.
Eleni sends this excellent article from her friend, the author, Graeme MacQueen, 9/11, The Pentagon's B-Movie. It really, really was "filmic". Details here.
If you live in the US, don't travel a lot, and watch TV, you might have some fundamental misperceptions about how the rest of the world sees the US, and Americans. (We are not as big a deal as we think, unless we are meeting with a realtor or a pimp somewhere.) Thanks Charles.
There are hard limits to how many transactions a blockchain, like Bitcoin or Ethereum can support. Hard and small. Each transaction must contain all of the prior transactions of all of the network, which is very secure and very energy-and-computation expensive. That's why I keep saying that these are a good central banking tool, not for buying groceries. Thanks Charles.
Bitcoin, despite having a theoretical limit of 4,000 transactions per second, currently has a hard cap of about 7 transactions per second for small transactions and 3 per second for more complex transactions.
https://hackernoon.com/blockchains-dont-scale-not-today-at-least-but-there-s-hope-2cb43946551a
Three decades of bad decisions have led us to this moment. Houston continues to sink from sucking out water and oil with straws, and it has grown unregulated, like a cancer. Here are some of the consequences. We are not at all ready to deal with this. What flood plain would you like to live in now? How about next to a Superfund chemical plant with widespread contamination, which will be back in operation as soon as testing and repairs are wrapped up?
Nobody thought this out to begin with, not more than individual projects with 5 year projections. How to rethink" Houston now? (Let's start with drawing realistic floodplains, then re-zoning prudently.) Thanks Charles.
Whaddaya mean, "no plastic for Christmas"? Holy Shit!
"Texas alone produces nearly three-quarters of the country’s supply of one of the most basic chemical building blocks. Ethylene is the foundation for making plastics essential to U.S. consumer and industrial goods, feeding into car parts used by Detroit and diapers sold by Wal-Mart Stores Inc... With Harvey’s floods shutting down almost all the state’s plants, 61 percent of U.S. ethylene capacity has been closed. "
Starting All Over
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