Saturday, August 11, 2018

Humeyra Pamuk — Turkey is a 'target of economic war', Erdogan says


Turkey joins Russia in declaring it is under US attack.
Erdogan said those who plotted against Turkey in a failed coup attempt in July 2016 were now trying to target the country through its economy, and pledged to fight back. He did not name any countries.
This is how WWIII starts. Leaders don't choose such words lightly.

The US now engaged in hybrid war with China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Did I forget anyone?

Reuters
Turkey is a 'target of economic war', Erdogan says
Humeyra Pamuk

See also at Reuters
The Turkish economy is not in a crisis or going bankrupt and the fluctuations in the foreign exchange rate are the ‘missiles’ of an economic war waged against Turkey, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.
Turkey is not in a crisis, will fight 'economic war', Erdogan says

See also

RT
Turkish lawyers want US soldiers arrested for 'ties to coup movement'

Ray McGovern — Senator Richard Burr: a Longtime Fan of Torture

Newly released declassified documents prove once and for all that CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw torture in Thailand, which the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee knew all along, as Ray McGovern explains.
Consortium News
Senator Richard Burr: a Longtime Fan of Torture
Ray McGovern, former US Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and 30 year CIA veteran analyst, including Presidential briefer from 1981 to 1985

See also

Intel Today
CIA & Torture — Gina Haspel Thailand Cables Declassified
L

Eric Margolis — To Hell With U.S. Jobs, Let’s Get Iran!

Washington’s denial to Iran of Boeing Aircraft (and Airbus planes because they contain US-made parts), means the loss of tens of thousands of highly-paid jobs in the US and Europe. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claims he talked Trump into canceling the Iran nuclear deal and the Boeing orders.
It’s hard to validate Netanyahu’s claim but it is clear that America’s ever more powerful Israel lobby and its ally fundamentalist Christian Zionists played a key role in thwarting the Iran nuclear deal and sale of commercial aircraft.
We don’t yet know the full cost of lost American jobs and business to help keep Iran isolated. But one could argue that part of the $20 billion lost should be counted as part of annual US aid to Israel.

Russia and China’s aircraft industries will soon be able to deliver modern passenger aircraft to Iran and accept payment in oil. China’s C919 and ARJ21 are now nearing service. Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 will be ready soon....
Eric Margolis
To Hell With U.S. Jobs, Let’s Get Iran!
Eric Margolis, author of the American Raj.

Frank Li — History 2.0

The dramatic rise of China over the past four decades not only has rocketed China's economy to the top of the world (in terms of PPP - purchasing power parity), with no end in sight, but also is ending western dominance over the past 200 years, at least.
What does that mean to the world? Everything, from politics (End of Democracy?) to economics (Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx)!
To understand the profound implication of this change, we must truly understand the past, for which we must re-examine the history, thus "History 2.0" ...
Important.

economicintesect.com
History 2.0
Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from the University of Tokyo in 1985, and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1988, all in Electrical Engineering

Andrew Gelman — Discussion of the value of a mathematical model for the dissemination of propaganda


On manufacturing controversy where there is none.

Also about relevance of mathematical modeling.

Short, not wonkish.

The propaganda ideal is to manufacture consent and that is too difficult, to manufacture controversy that paralyzes action. This is similar to the military strategy of achieving victory and where that is not possible to sew chaos.

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Discussion of the value of a mathematical model for the dissemination of propaganda
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

Michael Roberts — Turkey: total meltdown

How can Erdogan get out of this currency crash? The capitalist solution is to hike interest rates to an astronomical height so that further borrowing is stopped. Then the government should dramatically cut government spending and raise taxes (ie fiscal austerity) and use the ‘savings’ to bolster the banks and meet foreign debt repayments. Turkey should also turn to the IMF for a loan – Greek style. Under IMF rules, it could borrow up to $28bn to fund future debt repayments but then be subject to the dictats of IMF austerity measures. This capitalist solution means an outright slump in the Turkish economy, hitting its citizens hard and seriously damaging Erdogan’s support in the country.
The government could introduce capital controls and block any money leaving the country. But this would mean that foreign lenders would just stop lending, driving the economy into a slump anyway. Or Erdogan could try to get funding from Russia, China or Saudi Arabia (as Pakistan has just done). Unfortunately, he is on bad terms with all these countries. Erdogan is resisting all these options so far, telling his supporters to ‘trust in God’ and him.
The bigger issue is the growing emerging market debt crisis. This is what I said in May after Turkey’s general election. “Rising global interest rates and the growing trade war initiated by US President Trump are going to hit the so-called emerging capitalist economies like Turkey. The cost of borrowing in foreign currency will rise sharply and foreign investment is likely to reverse…..Turkey is now near the top of the pile for a debt crisis, along with Argentina (already there), Ukraine and South Africa.”
So there’s more to come.
What's the lesson likely to be drawn in the emerging world? Capitalism doesn't work and comes with the price of Western control of the emerging country and exacting of tribute.
The bottom line is that the price of entry into the US market is US control of your country's entire policy.
The alternative its that countries can ally with Russia and China and face off with the US military.
That's empire and the extracting tribute in contemporary form.
Who is this an opportunity for?

Maybe China, which is proposing a different world order?

Does the US really think that the emerging world is going to roll over and acquiesce in re-colonization?

This is what the US is aiming for with Russia, too, in order to encircle China using economic warfare while also ramping up US military dominance, now also in space.

Donald Trump aiming to become the new Caesar Augustus?

WWIII anyone?

Michael Roberts Blog
Turkey: total meltdown
Michael Roberts

See also

Although the US was essentially defeated in its attempt to remove Assad, the US leadership has not given up on the plan to extend US hegemony to the entire Middle East (MENA).

The attempted coup against the democratically elected government in Turkey failed. This is the next iteration on "humanitarian" pretexts.

Defend Democracy Press
The Empire Hits Turkey. Opening the way to Teheran, Cutting Russia from Syria

Trump doubles Tariffs on Turkey product in face of TRY devaluation


This tariff increase is probably an example of what Trump will do in the face of any significant foreign currency devaluation:




Which may cause feedback of further devaluation in the subject currency vs. USD as the foreign merchants will have to lower the prices of their product in USD terms even more if they want to compete on price in the US market (ie then Risk down/Non-risk up at the banks, etc...)

 I'd think the process would eventually end when the foreign nation simply has no more financed inventory of product intended to be sold in USDs; which may be Trump's goal...



Friday, August 10, 2018

Sputnik — Ikea Chaos: Opening of First Store in India Causes Stampede, Traffic Jam (VIDEO)


Consumerism.

Sputnik International
Ikea Chaos: Opening of First Store in India Causes Stampede, Traffic Jam (VIDEO)

Paul Robinson — The use of force

Reading them was another of those occasions when I felt a powerful urge to say, ‘Well, duh!’. Putin, we’re told, only uses force when vital interests are at stake and a cost-benefit analysis suggests that benefits will outweigh costs. Of course! What else would you expect? After all, what’s the alternative? To wage war when vital interests are not at stake and when you don’t expect to end up better off? That would be crazy. …
And that’s where this article’s statement of the blindingly obvious becomes quite interesting. For, viewed this way, what this article explains to us is not the conditions under which Putin uses force so much as the conditions under which the West does so – when vital interests aren’t at stake, and when we end up worse off afterwards. Judging by this article, we’ve now become so used to this that anything else apparently comes as a big surprise.
"American exceptionalism."

So the US has become a country that can't keep agreements and acts irrationally. Where is this leading?

Irrussianality
The use of force
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

The Real News - New US Sanctions on Russia and Iran Raise Tensions, May Backfire

Max Bluthenthal says how the Neocons haven't got a clue about diplomacy because their actions are actually strengthening Putin in Russia as he had become less popular due to his increasing public payments to pensions and his increasing of the retirement age. Max Bluthenthal says how Micheal Morell, ex CIA, argued that America should arm the jihadists more so they could kill the maximum amount of Russians and Iranians in Syria. Well, I will keep a note of that and bring it up in the Guardians's CiF how the US arms the head chopping terrorists. 



The US has imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia over the Skripal poisoning in Britain, despite the absence to date of evidence. This follows the reimposition of Iran sanctions following Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. The sanctions will further bleed the targeted countries, but could they backfire? We speak to journalist and best-selling author Max Blumenthal.

Asif Aziz — It’s Not a ‘Defense’ of Alex Jones to Argue That We’re On a Slippery Slope of Internet Censorship

When you hound the parents of dead children and promote the theory that inter-dimensional “lizard people” are secretly running the world, you relinquish the right to be taken seriously by a lot of people.
But this is not about Alex Jones or what he believes. It is about the fact that the Left has willfully decided that massive corporations, working hand-in-glove with government agencies, as we know they do, should be the arbiters of truth and should hold the power to decide what we see, hear, read and believe.
Left? Or corporate shills trying desperately to control the narrative? Certainly, many on the so-called left but actually center-right on world standards have been co-opted by the Democratic established going by the name New Democrats and Theory Way, but which is really the political machine working in the interests of the donors.
This neo-McCarthyism has been steadily creeping back into the mainstream for years, but gathered steam with the election of Donald Trump and the onset of Russiagate, which has gripped American political discourse now for the better part of two years. Once-skeptical “liberals”are suddenly in thrall to the benevolent “intelligence community” and are more than happy to brand as a traitor to America anyone who questions its power and innate goodness.
The qestion is, Who decides?
Those cheering Jones’ collective banning at the hands of all-powerful digital overlords should ask themselves a few questions.
Do you really want tech giants, working with governments, to be the ones deciding what constitutes “fake” news? Who gets to decide what a conspiracy theory is? Who gets to decide when something is “real”journalism or when it sows “radical discontent” and “division” and should be banned or labelled as dangerous and divisive hate speech?
To suggest that the “slippery slope” argument doesn’t hold water and that Alex Jones is a unique case is to be blind to reality.…
"First they came for Alex Jones.…"
Some on the progressive left have opposed this creeping censorship, cognizant of the fact that it leads to nowhere healthy, but others have cheered along, perhaps under the naive and totally false assumption that only the right-wing will feel the sting.
Well, they shouldn’t feel so comfortable. Google has already been accused of censoring left-wing and socialist websites. Sites like Alternet, Democracy Now and Counterpunch all experienced huge drops in trafficsince Google changed its algorithms to combat “fake news” online....
 Astute News — Opinion
It’s Not a ‘Defense’ of Alex Jones to Argue That We’re On a Slippery Slope of Internet Censorship
Asif Aziz

Jack Hunter — Rand Paul Against the World


Apparently Rand Paul is very close to the president and is providing a voice of reason that Trump is listening to above the cacophony of "experts."

The American Conservative
Rand Paul Against the World
Jack Hunter

The following is part-3 in an open series meant to introduce the basics of modern monetary theory (MMT) and to explore the potential for MMT’s radical model of macroeconomic reality to intersect with revolutionary theory and struggle. In part-1, the basic principles and monetary mechanics of MMT were presented alongside an irresponsibly brief review of money’s evolution from its prehistoric origins to the ongoing failure of orthodox economics to explain how money functions today. Part 2 looked at how MMT re-writes the rules of public spending and how it could be used by the working classes to build radical organizations and fight the power of capital with a self-managed federal job guarantee. And now Part 3 presses on to new territory where, for the first (and probably last) time, engine mechanics and the state theory of money will become relevant to a discussion of one of history’s most exhilarating topics — taxes. (Please, don’t leave)…
John Lauritis Blog
On the State Theory of Money, Social Power, & Taxes: Modern Money Systems 3
John Lauritis

Martin Armstrong — Why Did the USA Invade Iraq?


Short backgrounder on the recent film, "Shock and Awe."

How the neocons hijacked US policy with lies.

Armstrong Economics
Why Did the USA Invade Iraq?
Martin Armstrong

Reuters — US Curbs On Russian Banks Would Be Act Of Economic War


Let that sink in. That is throwing down the gauntlet. It's going there.

Recall that the US entered WWII as a result of the US blockade of Japan, which Japan interpreted as an act of war and responded by attacking Pearl Harbor.
In a sign of how seriously Russia is taking the threat, President Vladimir Putin discussed what the Kremlin called “possible new unfriendly steps by Washington” with his Security Council on Friday.
What is especially dangerous is that just about the only Americans that understand this are those that want kinetic war with Russia to "finish the job once and for all."

To deal effectively with rising China, the US must either make Russia an ally or defeat Russia first. The former is Kissinger's solution, which has almost no chance of succeeding, and the later is insanity — psychopathy and sociopathy.

This is headed in a very bad direction. It is looking more and more like a Thucydides trap is springing.

Reuters
US Curbs On Russian Banks Would Be Act Of Economic War
Andrew Osborn, Andrey Ostroukh

See also
This means that Russia’s whole military and intelligence command has been mobilized to discuss the latest American sanctions....
Go figure.  Jafe Arnold draws the conclusion.
Putin’s convening of the Security Council to discuss Washington’s new sanctions suggests that Moscow is calculating a response which, given the council meeting’s military-intelligence make-up, might include measures not restricted to the economic sphere....
Fort Russ
Will Russia HIT BACK at U.S. Sanctions? Putin Convenes Security Council
Jafe Arnold

See also
In sum, while a China-led global economy will remain open to trade, it will be less respectful of US intellectual property, less receptive to US foreign investment, and less accommodating of US exporters and multinationals seeking a level playing field. This is the opposite of what the Trump administration says it wants. But it is the system that the administration’s own policies are likely to beget.
In further sum, globalization under China would be more socialistic than capitalistic.

Project Syndicate
Globalization with Chinese Characteristics
Barry Eichengreen | Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and formerly a senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Jeff Brown — Button up yer bungholes boys n’ girls, cuz Baba Beijing is bringing on the badass

 
Russian and Chinese military capability versus US.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Button up yer bungholes boys n’ girls, cuz Baba Beijing is bringing on the badass
Crossposted from China Rising

RT — First they came for Alex Jones… Now Facebook bans Venezuela news site

Days after the purge of Alex Jones from social media, Big Tech seems to have found another suitable target for apparent censorship. Facebook suspended the page of a prominent leftist news site writing about Venezuela.
Venezuelanalysis.com, a left-leaning news site that writes from a pro-Bolivarian revolution stance, has been around since 2003. Critics, including the US government, brand it as a propaganda outlet of the government in Caracas. The site says it is funded by donations and lists as its team Western-born journalists and filmmakers, as well as endorsements from dozens of Western intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone.
Can't challenge the narrative. Heaven forbid.

Shit storm in the forecast.

RT
First they came for Alex Jones… Now Facebook bans Venezuela news site

See also

Trending.
  • Facebook lets you deactivate or delete your account, only the latter of which is permanent.
  • This deletes all of your Facebook data from Facebook's servers, save for anonymous log files.
  • Here's how to fully delete Facebook.
CNBC — Tech Guide (4 April 2018)
How to delete everything Facebook knows about you
Todd Haselton

See also
This is censorship. There will of course be apologists for the corporate control of speech, on both the left and right, who will say, ‘It’s only censorship when the government does it!’. They are so wrong. When enormous companies that have arguably become the facilitators of public debate expel someone and his ideas because they find them morally repugnant, that is censorship. Powerful people have deprived an individual and his network of a key space in which they might propagate their beliefs. Aka censorship.
Spiked
Alex Jones and the Rise of Corporate Censorship
Brendan O'Neill | Editor

See also
Last year, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”...
In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government’s policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship.
Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship
Caitlin Johnstone

See also
An all-out battle is raging against alternative views in the country that has positioned itself as the champion of the freedom of speech despite the fact that 90% of its media are controlled by just 6 companies. For comparison, in 1983, 90% of US media were controlled by 50 companies. Naturally, the trend negatively affects press freedom. According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders or RSF, the US dropped two positions compared to 2017, sliding to No. 45 overall. The role of competition has diminished while bias has become a norm. According to the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media and Democracy report, only 44 percent Americans say they can identify a news source that they believe reports the news objectively.
Strategic Culture Foundation
Alex Jones Purge: US Tech Giants Meddle into 2018 Midterm Elections 
Peter Korzun

Amazingly, the American ruling elite think that they can control the narrative by controlling the corporate media. Even the Soviet Union could not do this. See samizdat.

This assumption is moronic when over half the country is onto you.

Related

While the following article is highly relevant concerning the blowback from sanctioning Russia, and he doesn't even mention the obvious distrust of hold USD and US denominated assets involves, or the hit to soft power, the take away that is most relevant to this thread is the final sentence about the Atlantic Council, which is supervising Facebook censorship.
"Congress should focus on updating and enforcing these sanctions while incorporating new ideas from the Atlantic Council and others […]," the expert wrote.
Now "they" don't even bother about burying their tracks.

TASS
US expert warns new anti-Russian sanctions will damage American corporations

Also

The Duran
Facebook teams up with NATO to censor news (Video)

This is going dump more fuel on the incipient civil war in America, which has been "soft" so far, excepting a few incidents.

Danny Blue: The Life of a Mentalist in Danger

Do you know, I was just watching a Real News video where a professor was saying that we are now closer to a nuclear catastrophic than ever before and I was sizing it up for MNE's when I got depressed. We read here all the time about the evil side of human nature and it can get hard at times, so I thought, how can I cheer myself up a bit and maybe find something different for MNE's, and then I thought of Danny blue, a mentalist. I watched a number of his videos a few years back and I was pretty impressed I will have to say, and considering his immense talent, I was also impressed by his modesty. Anyway, this video is jaw dropping although very slow to start because of getting things set up. If it interest you but you find it too slow then go to 6 minutes. How he got away with this stunt I will never know?  The drivers have no idea which box Danny Blue is behind.


Danny Blue, mentalist put his own life in real danger. The tv-star asked 3 racing drivers to hit 3 of 4 boxes without them knowing in which Danny would stand. Amazing reactions!

Tyler Durden — US Senate Calls On Julian Assange To Testify

Julian Assange has been asked to testify before the US Senate Intelligence Committee as part of their Russia investigation, according to a letter signed by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA) posted by the official WikiLeaks Twitter account.
The letter, delivered to Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, reads in part "As part of the inquiry, the Committee requests that you make yourself available for a closed interview with bipartisan Committee staff at a mutually agreeable time and location." ...
The post provides the background leading to this request, if you are not familiar with it, or need a quick summary.

Not favorable for the FBI, especially when they did not secure or even examine the server involved as evidence.

Senior FBI officials involved in not only a coverup but also a frame up?

Michael Roberts — Greece: on parole


Backgrounder on Greece (and the IMF and Eurocrats). A sad tale of elite rule and rent extraction off the back of ordinary workers with no power or influence — unless they rise up angry and are willing to pursue it.

Michael Roberts Blog
Greece: on parole
Michael Roberts

Lars P. Syll — Abba Lerner and the nonsense called ‘Ricardian equivalence’


Abba Lerner versus Robert Barro.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Abba Lerner and the nonsense called ‘Ricardian equivalence’
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Bill Mitchell — MMT is just plain old bad economics – Part 1

On August 6, 2018, British tax expert Richard Murphy who is becoming increasingly sympathetic to the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) published a blog post, which recorded an exchange with one James Meadway, who is the economics advisor to the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in Britain. The exchange took place on the social media page of a Labour Party insider who has long advocated a Land Tax, which McDonnell is on the public record as saying will “raise the funds we need” to help local government. He called it a “radical solution” (Source). An aside, but not an irrelevant one. It reflects the mindset of the inner economics camp in the British Labour Party, a mindset that is essentially in lockstep with the neoliberal narrative about fiscal policy. Anyway, his chief advisor evidently openly attacked MMT as “just plain old bad economics” and called it a “regression in left economic thinking” which would ultimately render the currency “entirely worthless” if applied. He also mused that any application of MMT would be “catastrophic” for Britain. Apparently, only the US can apply MMT principles. Well, the exchange was illustrative. First, the advisor, and which I guess means the person being advised, do not really understand what MMT is. Second, the Labour Party are claiming to be a “radical and transformative” force in British politics, yet hang on basic neoliberal myths about the monetary system, which is at the core of government policy implementation. Astounding really. This is Part 1 of a two-part series on this topic, most of it will be summarising past analysis. The focus here is on conceptual issues. Part 2 will focus more specifically on Balance of Payments issues.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
MMT is just plain old bad economics – Part 1
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Keiser Report: Emerging & Declining Superpowers (E1263)

This is good, a top US official says that China is overloading the world with debt as it builds its new Silk Road and invests in those countries. Now that's rich, the West has been overloading the world in debt for decades through the IMF and the World Bank and plundering their economies through privatisation so that its elite can buy up everything in those countries. But China is investing in third world countries instead, helping them to build up their economies making them richer, which improves their markets for Chinese made goods.

It's win, win, whereas the West preferred to extract all the resources out of these countries instead taking all the money and running off with it making the populations of these countries much poorer. 

The other way the Western elite have made a lot of money is by bombing the rest of the world into submission which is good for investors in the military-industrial complex.



In this Summer Solution episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy contrast the situation with China, a perhaps emerging superpower, to the United States, a possibly declining superpower. As the US grew powerful as an empire of debt, extracting resources and equity from economies colonized by their debt rather than their military armies, what happens when China begins doing the same? Lots of complaints from U.S. officials who want American lenders to take over debt markets the U.S. has overlooked in the past few decades. They look at the case of Africa where Chinese mobile phone manufacturers and tech entrepreneurs are radically altering the telecom landscape left wide open to them after the departure of Nokia. What happens when the African consumer becomes wealthy enough to transform the Chinese global power play?

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Zero Hedge — Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography


The cream of Sy Hersh's autobiography.
From a recent The Intercept interview and book review — If Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America’s indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, “a reminder of the Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it’s a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime.” It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: “I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier” in Chicago.
“Reporter” demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:
  • The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
  • The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
  • The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it....
Morons, or psychopaths and sociopaths, or a combination of both?

Zero Hedge
Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography
Tyler Durden

Graham E. Fuller — Pakistan Elections—Maybe Good News for Pakistan, But Not for U.S.


Backgrounder. Should read if interested in geopolitics, geostrategy and international relations. This is a pivotal area of the world that most Westerners ignore as "backward." It is now coming into play and will be increasingly influential in the dynamic among the Atlanticists, Russia, India, and China, owing to developing strategic importance as the rivalry between the Global North and West versus the Global South and East heats up.

This pretty much boils down to the developed world versus the emerging world. Previously, the developed world was dominant, but the game has shifted as the developed world begins to peak and decline while the emerging world emerges more and more rapidly. The combined GDP of the emerging world surpassed that of the developed world in the past decade.

Pakistan is a key piece on the grand chessboard (

Graham E. Fuller Blog
Pakistan Elections—Maybe Good News for Pakistan, But Not for U.S.
Graham E. Fuller | adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University, formerly vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, and a former senior political scientist at RAND

See also

Graham Fuller is an old hand. Andrew Korybko is an up and comer.

Oriental Review
Pakistan’s New Leader Is A Democratically Elected Populist-Visionary
Andrew Korybko

The Real News - Why Are Liberal Media Outlets Not Questioning Russiagate? Q&A (Pt 4/5)

I thought this was an excellent analysis of the Ruissiagate myth.  Paul Jay describes how the Russians were once portrayed as evil, godless communists, but now they are capitalist the establishment stills portrays Russia as deadly evil. People were  programmed to hate Russia during the Cold War and this is still deep in American psyche (which was designed to also put people off communism)  and with all that momentum built up it is easy to still get people worked up and frightened about Russia. Paul Jay says that the reason for this is to drive more arms sales for the military-industrial complex. What an evil way to make money, and it's lazy?

I haven't seen the other parts but I think they will be very good. 


Eric Zuesse - Conclusive Proof: Hitler Intended Exterminating All the World’s Jews

First Annotated Web-Publication of the Complete Official Record of Hitler’s Meeting with, and Promises to, the Mufti of Jerusalem

Chilling reading!


Adolf Hitler’s private and confidential meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, on 28 November 1941, right at the start of his Holocaust to get rid of “the Jews,” was enormously significant historically, because he was here secretly informing the leader of Palestine, about what Hitler’s plan was for Jews after Hitler would eliminate them from Europe. This is one of the few key documents that make unequivocal Hitler’s determination to eliminate every Jew on the planet — not merely every Jew in Europe. (which he publicly threatened to do).
As will be documented here, online for the very first time, and with links to the only existing online sources in the English language: Hitler privately expressed his explicit intention to cleanse (exterminate) Jews from Palestine, and to make the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem the “liberator” of all Arabs, not only the Palestinian leader. Hitler said that, as soon as Hitler would finish wiping out all Jews in Europe, he would publicly authorize, arm, and assist, the Mufti, to oversee exterminating them in Palestine and throughout all Arab regions; and this is what the Mufti wanted, so that the Mufti would then become the “liberator” of all Arabs (by killing all Jews in Arabia), and the Mufti would therefore be ruling, under Emperor Hitler, a vast Arab kingdom. The only initial disagreement between Hitler and the Mufti, was that the Mufti wanted Hitler to announce this intention immediately to the world, but Hitler told him that publicly announcing it at this time would be premature — the public announcement of his intention would occur only (and as soon as) all Jews had already been cleansed from Europe. At the meeting’s very end, the Mufti said that he was thoroughly persuaded by Hitler’s reasoning; the Mufti no longer wanted Hitler to announce it immediately. By the meeting’s end, they agreed on the timing of the public announcement. They parted in 100% agreement about what should be done, and in what order.

In short: This document is one (there are others) that exposes the utter fraudulence of the ‘historians’ who allege either that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’, or that he didn’t hold the intention of exterminating each and every Jew, everywhere, and that he didn’t hold this exterminationist intention firmly, with conviction, and (in the case of this document) well before the Holocaust was at an advanced stage in Europe, or anywhere. 
Strategic Cultures

World Economic Forum — Emerging economies are now richer than the West

 Emerging and Developing Economies for the First Time Account for a Larger Share of World GDP or Global Output Than Developed Economies; A Point Surpassed After the 2008 Financial Crisis That Has Continued Apace (See Figure 1)....
How has this been achieved? Possessing good institutions is what economists have come to focus on and the spread of such institutions seems to have been key, as the father of New Institutional Economics predicted. The seminal work in this area was by Douglass North who was frustrated by neoclassical economic models that focused on measurable factors like workers and investment, with attempts to measuring technological progress, even though they could not fully explain why some economies grow well and others do not.

So, North took economics out of its comfort zone, which consisted of examining more easily measured inputs like labour and capital, and instead brought in politics, psychology, and strategy, as well as history, in order to understand why some countries succeed and others fail. He stressed that there was no reason why countries could not learn from more successful economies to better their own institutions. That finally happened in the 1990s....
This sort of imitation of good institutions and effective economic policies was as outlined by institutional economists such as Douglass North. It took the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rescue of India by the IMF in 1991 as well as China’s re-orientation towards the global economy in 1992 for these economies to look to adopt a new course. By emulating ‘best practice’ in other economies as well as opening up, which meant learning from more successful foreign companies, these countries have made tremendous progress as North would have expected. He would have approved of these economies looking more widely than just on capital or labour or technology in fashioning their growth policies.

North once remarked: “My pet peeve all through the last twenty years or thirty years has been the narrowness of economists, in fact of all social scientists, in not opening up whole new areas” (North et al. 2015: 9). And his ideas have brought us closer than ever before to answering the age-old question of how countries can become rich.
The take-away from Douglass North's work is not so much that capitalism is the superior system in the sense that conventional economics treats it as that Western approaches to socio-economic and political organization proved superior to other approaches. The issues are more complicated than the simplified models of conventional economics, with their restrictive assumptions that are ideologically based — e.g., maximization and equilibrium. North recognized that broader scope was required.

North adopted a different methodology that includes all factors he found to be relevant rather than seeking formal elegance but sacrificing empirical relevance. North was an institutional economist that specialized in development economics, and he worked in quantitative economic history (cliometrics), as well, which was needed for his empirical research.

World Economic Forum
Emerging economies are now richer than the West
In collaboration with VoxEU

Joseph Menn — U.S. think tank's tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media


The Atlantic Council is now the national censor.

Check out who and what the Atlantic Council represents and who funds it, and then go figure. Right, the Atlanticists, a euphemism for the Anglo-American Empire of the combined American and British elite and their European vassals.
Facebook donated an undisclosed amount to the lab in May that was enough, said Graham Brookie, who runs the lab, to vault the company to the top of the Atlantic Council’s donor list, alongside the British government.…
The [Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research] Lab was founded by Brookie, a National Security Council advisor in the last four years of the Obama administration. Ben Nimmo is a co-founder. He joined after stints as a journalist covering the Baltic states as they sparred with Russia a decade ago and as a spokesman for NATO on Russia and Ukraine. 
Well, what did you expect?

Reuters
U.S. think tank's tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media
Joseph

See also
Facebook Inc. FB, +0.59% has asked big U.S. banks to share financial information on their customers that includes checking account balances and card transactions, as it seeks to expand its own service offer and stem slowing growth, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.…
MarketWatch
Facebook has asked big U.S. banks to share customer data so it can offer services: WSJ
Ciana Linnane | Corporate News Editor

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Evgeni Super — Russia has started building its own Internet


"Digital divide" takes on new meaning and the world fractures into opposing camps. Where does it should like that is leading?
Russia has started work to create a global satellite Internet system “Sphere”. The project involves deployment of a system consisting of 640 small satellites that will provide integrated communication, navigation and remote sensing throughout the planet. This incredibly complex but implementable task will allow us to create our own national system of access to the Internet and mobile communications, independent from third countries. However, this project is only part of a comprehensive strategy to strengthen the information sovereignty of our country.
Now we are working on building our own system of root DNS servers, independent of ICANN, which generally determine the operation of the global Internet addressing and most of which is now under the control of the United States. Based on the ideasof the father of China’s firewall Fan Binsina, which indicates possibility for several countries, such as Russia and China, to create a direct communication bypassing the root DNS servers in the United States.
Despite the fact that the Internet has long became a part of our lives, we are on the threshold of the Internet of things era, in which the importance of this network will increase. However, in fact, Russia is unarmed before Washington’s attempts to disconnect us, if not from an entire network, then from many of its important components, for example, electronic certificates. Unlike China, we do not have a country certificate, which means that with just one click “overseas” can create many problems for us, including in transportation and other critical infrastructures. And these are just some of the likely threats.
All our efforts are now aimed at overcoming this dependency as soon as possible. But it is important to understand that we are not talking about creating our own isolated from the world Internet. We are trying to ensure our ability to use the world network without being hooked up to the “foreign switch.” In case of successful implementation, users in Russia will not notice any inconvenience at all....
The Vineyard of the Saker
Russia has started building its own Internet
Evgeni Super
Translated and subtitled by Scott Humor