Naked Capitalism has the article North Korea: How Obama Regime Change Policy Created the Crisis Trump Has Inherited.

The agreement, which froze North Korea’s nuclear program for 12 years, held for several years. But in 2002, the Bush administration accused the DPRK—falsely it turned out—of building a secret uranium program as a second route to a bomb and tore up the framework.

Well, I am not sure how false the accusation was. Compare this to the interview in a previous post on this blog, Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat – But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is. Wilkerson claims that when the North Koreans were presented CIA evidence of their renewed nuclear efforts, they readily admitted it. However, what they were doing was not a violation of the agreement made with the Clinton administration.

Whichever one of these stories you choose to believe, the rest of this current article I am discussing provides lots of details I was not aware of.

It’s difficult to overstate how reactionary Obama’s policies became. In contrast to Bush, and even Trump, Obama flatly rejected the idea of negotiating with the North without a prior commitment to denuclearization. He also expressed no interest in the DPRK’s offer to sign a peace agreement. More disturbingly, he was the first president in history to refer to the Korean War, which has been universally recognized as a bloody stalemate, as a “victory.” In doing so, Obama revived a right-wing trope that was first used in the 1950s and resurrected during the Bush years by David Frum and other neocons. So from the onset, Obama caused America’s policy toward Korea to take a sharp right turn.

Given conflicting reports of what is going on, it is hard to know whom to believe, and how much of what they say can be believed.

With all the excitement of supposed Russian attacks on the DNC computers to steal email, I get the feeling that most people don’t understand how common attacks on web sites are.

I just got an email about an unusual number of attacks on this blog.

The Firewall has blocked 126 attacks over the last 10 minutes. Below is a sample of these recent attacks:

September 7, 2017 1:06pm 173.212.193.32 (Germany) Blocked

I have edited the messages a tad to remove information that might help the attacker. However, the point is that these attacks can come from anywhere. The location of the computer that is doing the attacking is not an indication that the government of that country is doing the attacking. It is not even an indication of the location of the person who initiated the attack.

Just to prove the point, I know that the computer that is hosting this blog is in the western part of the USA, while I am sitting in Massachusetts creating this post.

New Economic Perspectives has the post LOW EARTH ORBIT—A Preview. For years, I have been trying to get people to imagine this scenario, but most people just cannot wrap their minds around it. Perhaps this author has put the proper words together to reach people’s imaginations.

“Digital Labor,” it had come to pass, could produce—with enormous profitability—virtually everything the world’s consumers might want or need to buy. In the end, however, the consumers who were supposed to be doing the buying were not just out of work—they were unable to earn the money they needed to buy the products and services so “profitably” produced.

I have recorded the essential question embodied on this web site’s quote page.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source
If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?

It is up to societies through their governments to reorganize the rules so that all “men” eat. When are we going to start? Not during the Trump administration will the rules change, but we can build the pressure for that change so that it begins to happen in 2020, maybe even in 2018. One thing that I can guarantee is that neither Hillary Clinton nor the DNC has the vision to even imagine this, let alone work for the necessary changes.

The Real News Network has the video Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat – But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is.

Col. Wilkerson and TRNN’s Paul Jay discuss the underlying forces driving the U.S./North Korea confrontation

This video starts off with a more complete description of the deal with North Korea initiated by Bill Clinton in 1994. In the post False Allegations Get False Clarifications On NBC Nightly News I published a description that was less detailed. The less detailed article did not go into how badly we reneged on our part of the agreement.

Counterpunch has the article What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests.

“Prior to President Trump’s inauguration, North Korea made it clear it was prepared to give the new U.S. administration time to review the policy and come up with something better than President Obama’s. The only wrinkle was that if the U.S. went full-steam ahead with its annual joint exercises with South Korea (especially if that were accompanied by more talk of “decapitation” and more flights of strategic bombers over the Korean peninsula), the North would react strongly.

In short, the U.S. did, and the North reacted.

Behind-the-scenes contacts went up and down, but couldn’t get traction. In April, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un paraded new missiles as a warning, to no effect. The regime launched the new systems, one after another. Still, Washington’s approach didn’t change.” (Analysis: Pyongyang’s view of the North Korea-U.S. crisis”, CBS News)

I already knew the gist of this story, but it adds a lot of details that I had not been following. Our esteemed Senator Ed Markey just keeps piling on fuel to this fire without a hint that this is going on in the background.

The Nation has the article A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo with dateline September 1, 2017.

Data-transfer speeds across networks and the Internet measured in megabits per second (or megabytes per second) can easily achieve rates that greatly exceed the cited reference in the VIPS memo of 1,976 megabytes in 87 seconds (∼22.71 megabytes per second or ∼181.7 megabits per second), and well beyond 50 megabytes, depending on the capacity of the network and the method of access to that network. Speeds across the network vary greatly, and sustained write speeds copied out to local devices are often quite a bit slower.

This criticism is amazingly similar to the analysis that I published on July 24, 2017 based on my own independent analysis of the VIPS report. See Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence.

I must admit that I did not read all of The Nation’s article – TL;DR – or Too long; Didn’t read. However, no matter what is the truth about this story, my point has always been that I think it is a mistake to publish an article that makes claims that you can’t really support. Claims like this destroy the author’s credibility even if the gist of the article is correct.

In a subsequent post, I talk about more information has come to light on the VIPS memo. This puts to rest my critique of the memo that I have made here.

Evidence shows DNC emails downloaded locally – NSA whistleblower.