Consortium News has republished the article Donald Trump v. the Spooks.

This excerpt explains the context.

From the Archive: Just before Trump took office last year, ex-British intelligence officer Annie Machon wrote about the battle he was facing with U.S. intelligence agencies. As Russia-gate morphs into Intel-gate, we re-publish her prescient article today.

The author dislikes Trump’s domestic, economic, and most foreign policy positions, but does find merit in his fight against the spooks. I have similar likes and dislikes about Trump.

This match has already gone into the middle rounds with Trump still bouncing around on his toes and still relishing the fight. It would be ironic if out of this nasty prize fight came greater world peace and safely for us all.

Having lived through this fight over the last year, it seems like the spooks are winning the battle to keep us in perpetual war.

The New York Times has the article As China Marches Forward on A.I., the White House Is Silent.

It is a good idea to be concerned, but there needs to be caution about going overboard for huge, centrally planned initiatives. From the article on China I have picked out the following excerpt.

“We may have a bunch of small initiatives inside the government that are doing good, but we don’t have a central national strategy,” said Jack Clark, a former journalist who now oversees policy efforts at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab co-founded by Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive. “It is confusing that we have this technology of such obvious power and merit and we are not hearing full-throated support, including financial support.”

The Trump administration’s budget for 2018 aims to cut science and technology research funding across the government by 15 percent, according to a report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“They are headed in precisely the wrong direction,” said Thomas Kalil, who led O.S.T.P’s Technology and Innovation Division under President Obama. “That is particularly concerning given that China has identified this as a strategic priority.”

It is probably true that Trump is going in the wrong direction, but remember that there are many wrong directions to pursue. Trump’s wrong direction is not the only one.

I remember back to the Fifth Generation Computer project by Japan in the 1980s. Wikipedi’s article is a decent summary of Japan’s failure.

The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines). The project did produce a new generation of promising Japanese researchers. But after the FGCS Project, MITI stopped funding large-scale computer research projects, and the research momentum developed by the FGCS Project dissipated. However MITI/ICOT embarked on a Sixth Generation Project in the 1990s.

While the Japanese program still looked like a good idea, there was a book about it The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence & Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World. As I read the book, I started to think that all this hoopla about our needing to mount a response to Japan was a wrong direction.

The strength of our (USA) system was the fact that there was a lot of competition among companies and universities researching the field. There was never a good chance to predict which research effort would lead to breakthroughs. The strength was that many things were tried, and the useful ones would tend to commercial success while the others would fade away. Betting everything on one track would have a high probability of failure.

What has lead to the resurgence of AI in recent history is not any of the things that Japan focused on. Who could have predicted the advance of microprocessors that power our PCs and the advent of the internet and big data?

This is not to say that government financing of research projects is not a good thing. This is just a precautionary tale to remind people that there are advantages to having a somewhat disorganized system. China may be smart enough to use moderation in thinking it can predict what the winning ideas will be.

Counterpunch has the article Why ‘Russian Meddling’ is a Trojan Horse.

A great article bringing together many factors with links to supporting articles. It is hard to pick just one example to quote. Here are two disparate quotes to just give you a hint of what is in here.

In 2013 the Obama administration ‘brokered’ (Mr. Obama’s term) a coup in the former Soviet state of Ukraine that ousted the democratically elected President to install persons favorable to the interests of Western oligarchs. At the time Hillary Clinton had just vacated her post as Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State to prepare for her 2016 run for president, but her lieutenants, including Victoria Nuland, were active in coordinating the coup and deciding who the new ‘leadership’ of Ukraine would be.

And this one more directly addressing the title of the article.

More than a year later, no credible evidence has been put forward to establish that any votes were changed due to ‘external’ meddling.

With regard to Victoria Nuland and where she came from politically, here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia article. She served in both Democratic and Republican administrations – Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

During the Bill Clinton administration, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

She served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO.

U.S. News & World Report has the article Trump’s Infrastructure Con.

America needs a big, bold infrastructure plan. Trump’s proposal is not one.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has a Facebook post about this article.

President Trump is right to talk about the need to rebuild our country’s infrastructure, but the proposal he introduced today is dead wrong.
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The reality is that Trump’s plan to privatize our nation’s infrastructure is an old idea that has never worked and never will work.

I immediately thought about the disastrous plans that we foisted on Russia to privatize its economy after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin is still working to rein in the damage that we caused.

The Nation has the article The Harvard Boys Do Russia.

Such questions need to be answered, but any serious inquiry must go beyond individual corruption and examine how U.S. policy, using tens of millions in taxpayer dollars, helped deform democracy and economic reform in Russia and helped create a fat-cat oligarchy run amok.

Institutional Investor has an article that touches on the some of the same topics – How Harvard lost Russia.

The articles in The Nation and Institutional Investor are long and involved. So far I have only had a chance to skim them to see that they confirm my understanding of how Harvard advisers steered Russia into disastrous economic policies.

Came across the following in the Pentagon Papers:

The Buddhists, while a cohesive and effective minority protest movement, lacked a program or the means to achieve power. The labor unions were entirely urban-based and appealed to only a small segment of the population. The clandestine political parties were small, urban, and usually elitist. The religious sects had a narrow appeal and were based on ethnic minorities. Only the Viet Cong had any real support and influence on a broad base in the countryside.

If our country claims to be for democracy in other countries, why is it that we pick as our enemy the only group that had “any real support and influence on a broad base in the countryside”? In the case of Vietnam at the time, the majority of the people were in the countryside, and not in the cities.

One would think that the excerpt above might be immune from being called propaganda since it seems to be against the very side who is stating this as a fact. To quote a newly coined phrase, “And yet we persisted.”

The UK Daily Mail has the article Robots and computers will commit more crime than humans by 2040, expert warns.

I post this as just one example of a published article where this thought has occurred to people. Yesterday, I would have reacted to such an article the way many who commented on it did. Most comments were very dismissive of the idea. For some reason, last night, it occurred to me that what is in this article is just a logical conclusion.

If Amazon can create drones to deliver packages, someone else could create a drone to steal a package. If the police can have robots to disarm criminals with less danger to police, a criminal could have a robot to commit armed robbery. With all the examples of cyber-crime we already know about, why wouldn’t a criminal start to think about how to use robots to commit crimes remotely from the human perpetrator?

The issue is not what some comments on the article say of a robot deciding to be a criminal. The issue is exactly what these commenters foresee. That is that there will be criminal people who will create robots to commit crimes for the criminal people.

Evonomics has the article Why New Economics Needs a New Invisible Hand. From the title alone, I didn;t know what the author was driving at, nor ehwther I could accept it or agree with it. Perhaps this excerpt is a spoiler.

The main take-home message is easy for anyone to understand. We must learn to function in two capacities: As designers of large-scale social systems and as participants in the social systems that we design. As participants, we don’t need to have the welfare of the whole system in mind, but as designers we do. There is no way around it. Anything short will result in social dysfunction.

This seems to fit nicely with the idea of social reflexivity that I first heard enunciated by George Soros. (I am not saying Soros invented the idea. I am just saying that I first heard about it from him.)

Economic philosopher George Soros, influenced by ideas put forward by his tutor, Karl Popper (1957), has been an active promoter of the relevance of reflexivity to economics, first propounding it publicly in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance. He regards his insights into market behavior from applying the principle as a major factor in the success of his financial career.
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Reflexivity asserts that prices do in fact influence the fundamentals and that these newly influenced set of fundamentals then proceed to change expectations, thus influencing prices; the process continues in a self-reinforcing pattern. Because the pattern is self-reinforcing, markets tend towards disequilibrium. Sooner or later they reach a point where the sentiment is reversed and negative expectations become self-reinforcing in the downward direction, thereby explaining the familiar pattern of boom and bust cycles An example Soros cites is the procyclical nature of lending, that is, the willingness of banks to ease lending standards for real estate loans when prices are rising, then raising standards when real estate prices are falling, reinforcing the boom and bust cycle.

The Sanders Institute has the video The Sanders Institute Talks: Student Loan Debt.

Dr. Jane O’Meara Sanders sits down with Sanders Institute Founding Fellow and economist Dr. Stephanie Kelton to talk about Dr. Kelton’s new report on the macroeconomic effects of student loan debt cancellation in the United States.

Dr. Stephanie Kelton is also one of the leading voices explaining Modern Money Theory. The implication is that she is well versed on how the student loan forgiveness program will affect economic behavior like inflation.

The Unz Review has the Mike Whitney article Washington Announces “Indefinite” U.S. Occupation of Syria and Creation of Kurdish State. Then, Recants.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced the creation of a de facto autonomous Kurdish state in east Syria that will be supported by the United States and defended by a US-backed “proxy” army of occupation. Tillerson’s announcement was made at a confab he attended at Stanford University at the Hoover Institute.

I have only had a chance to skim this article, but I heard the author talk about it in an interview. There is an amazing amount of info in his interview that clarifies what we are doing in Syria and its implications in the Middle East and around the world.

The interview occurred in the second half of the podcast that I posted on this blog New National Defense Strategy: Arms Race and Great Power Conflict.

Clearing The Fog Radio has the podcast New National Defense Strategy: Arms Race and Great Power Conflict.

The new National Defense Strategy announced last week moves from the ‘war on terror’ toward conflict with great powers. The move from military conflict against non-state actors, i.e. ‘terrorists’, to great power conflict means more military hardware, massive spending on weapons and a new arms race. We speak with Nicolas Davies and Mike Whitney about reasons for the change in defense strategy, the broad impacts it will have and how it will affect areas of conflict around the world.

There is just so much great analysis in this podcast, that I am glad I stumbled onto this. The first interview where the discussion was about US empire clarified a lot of issues for me. Of course, now that I am about 20% into The Pentagon Papers, I see the USA empire issue so much more clearly. The second interview that talked about Syria and North Korea helped clarify those issues for me too.

There is a companion piece on Popular Resistance titled New Defense Strategy: War With Great Nations & Arms Race that is written by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers who are the hosts in the above podcast.

The Consortium News article by Nicolas J.S. Davies is A National Defense Strategy of Sowing Global Chaos.

I have found the Mike Whitney Archive on The Unz Review.