Sunday, August 26, 2018

Matrix Wars

Free Thinkers,

Caitlin Johnstone: ​
And then, there are the oligarchs. The master manipulators. These corporate kings of the modern world have learned the secret that every ruler since the dawn of civilization has known: whoever controls the narratives that are believed by a society is the controller of that society. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government: all mental constructs which only influence society to the extent that they are believed and subscribed to by a significant majority of the collective. If you have influence over the things that people believe about those mental constructs, you have influence over society. You rule it. The oligarchs manipulate the narratives of entire societies.  

​Not part of that matrix, is (Bolshevik) Russian Social-political Theorist PyotrStolypi. Thank Eleni. This is translated, but useful for non-Russians.
We live in the world of models, all kinds of them. Some models are simple, others—very complex. The main task of those models is to predict how things, those models describe, will behave depending on the circumstances. Some of those models work brilliantly, others fail miserably. Worst models in terms of reliability are those dealing with geopolitics. A record of dismal failures of Western in general, and American in particular, geopolitical models to predict anything right is widely available for everyone to see. Time after time those models and predictions turned out to be wrong.
https://www.unz.com/article/grand-strategy-revisited/

​Worried about Secretary of State, John Bolton's foreshadowing remarks about "punishing Assad if he uses chemical weapons again", Russia sends more warships to the Syrian port of Tartus.​

Sun Tzu and the Art of Fighting A Trade War. Pepe Escobar points out that the Chinese Matrix has existed for thousands of years, and it is not identical. China has her own elite puppet-masters, who just spent a couple of weeks in a Davos kind of thing they do there.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass says that it is time for "A New World Order". Sounds catchy; kind of familiar, somehow.
We will not allow you to go over our heads, and at our expense. That is why it was right to protect European companies legally from sanctions. It is therefore essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels independent of the US, a European monetary fund and an independent SWIFT [payments] system. The devil is in thousands of details. But every day that the Iran agreement lasts, is better than the potentially explosive crisis that threatens the Middle East otherwise.
https://global.handelsblatt.com/opinion/making-plans-new-world-order-germany-us-trump-trans-atlantic-relations-heiko-maas-europe-956306#.W30v1EXjSfI.twitter

For now, and probably for only a few months ahead of the US mid-term elections in November, President Trump is forcing currency difficulties on his enemies by aggressive trade policies, including sanctions, and by weaponizing the dollar. It is a trick that has been used by successive American administrations for a considerable time. The Chinese are particularly wary of a currency war being waged against her yuan and are unlikely to escalate tensions unnecessarily. They are playing for and winning a longer game.
President Trump’s actions over trade, which appear to have some short-term successes, are driving countries away from 
America's​ sphere of influence. Ultimately this will prove counterproductive. Speculators buying into Trump’s short-termism and the Fed’s normalization policies are for the moment driving the dollar higher, without realizing that foreigners, far from suffering from a shortage of dollars, already own all the excess dollar liquidity created since the Lehman crisis. This seems certain to lead to the dollar’s downfall.
Therefore, the dollar is rising only on short-term considerations, driven by nothing more substantial than speculative flows. Once these abate, the longer-term prospects for the dollar will reassert themselves, including the escalating budget and trade deficits, record levels of foreign ownership of the dollar, and rising prices fueled by a combination of earlier monetary expansion and the extra taxes of trade tariffs.
And if that’s not enough, the erosion of its hegemony coupled with China’s future demands for infrastructure capital seem bound to lead to a fundamental reallocation of capital to the detriment of the dollar. No wonder China and Russia decided to corner the market for physical gold.


​Structural reasons the global economy is going into long deflation. This analysis doesn't need physics, or even climate change... The rich hoard, and the poor reproduce. It was cooperation in work and sharing rewards that brought us to our former peak (and oil, and forests, and coal, and iron ore...)
Of course, if per capita incomes reversed their current trajectories, this would change the math significantly.  But when you have a declining base of consumption among those with all the means to do so and growth among those with little or essentially no means... this is the most deflationary case possible.
​Nomi Prins, The fed Will Not Give Up Dark Money (So our oligarchs are trapped in their own Matrix until the power outage, i guess...)​

There's this. It emanates about a 590 nM wavelength of light under the right conditions, which are not rare, but occur daily.

Artificial General intelligence Is Here, and "Impala" Is It's Name (not "Bonneville", "Impala") Sorta' spooky, and not the distant future.

​Chevy Vega​

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