Steve's Politics Blog

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.

Tonight, August 30, on NBC Nightly News, Lester Holt made a clarification of some false allegations by Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the clarification was also false. At this moment, I cannot get the link to tonight’s broadcast to give you the exact words. That may have to wait until tomorrow.

At about 13:25 into the video below, Richard Engel explained in the following words:

President Trump is apparently refering to Clinton-era negottiation that failed to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Talks that often ended in aid payments.

Engel gives you no context on the “failure” to curb the nuclear ambitions. As I remember it what happened back then, the USA did not meet all the commitments of the deal so that North Korea gave up on trusting our promises.

I found a PBS documentary Examining the Lessons of the 1994 U.S.-North Korea Deal. I let you be the judge of whether or not NBC is at least guilty of lying by omission.

Here are some excerpts from the words of the interview with William Perry U.S. Sec’y of Defense (1994-1997); U.S. Special Envoy to North Korea (1999)

The Agreed Framework [provided] that North Korea would continue this suspension of all activities at Yongbyon, that that freeze would be verified by International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] inspectors at Yongbyon continuously, as well as remote verification equipment. That the allies, in this case United States, Japan and South Korea, would build them two light-water reactors — with appropriate safeguards to assure that the fuel could not be diverted from those reactors — and that when the reactors reached a certain stage of completion, then North Korea would dismantle all of its facilities at Yongbyon. And that in the meantime, the allies would provide heavy fuel oil to make up for the electricity that was lost by not having the reactors at Yongbyon operating.

In addition to that there were a number of qualitative statements in the agreement, basically which said that the North Korea and the United States, Japan and South Korea would work towards a harmonious relationship and in particular that they would work toward ending the armistice with a peace agreement, and then work head towards normal diplomatic relations. All of those were spelled out as goals in the Agreed Framework.

Here are some excerpts from Robert Gallucci Chief U.S. Negotiator with North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 1993-1994

The criticisms were of the following kinds: first that we had we had submitted to blackmail. The North Koreans were threatening us with a nuclear program, and we gave in and gave them good things. That we were appeasers. That this was a rogue regime. Had we learned nothing about the failures of appeasement to deal with regimes such as this? We also heard that the North Koreans wouldn’t stick with the deal, they’d cheat. And didn’t we know that they were the kind of folks who would cheat?

There are those now who have come forward from the Clinton administration saying that the deal was basically abandoned by the United States. That’s perhaps too strong, but that there was a lack of political will to enforce the Agreed Framework, that in fact, the complaints coming from North Korea that the United States dragged its feet and reneged have some validity.

My own view here is — and there are disagreements about this — that in the Clinton administration there wasn’t the enthusiasm for everything the North Koreans wanted in terms of the political pay-off from the deal. So the North Koreans were somewhat disappointed. But let’s be clear about this. There are hard and soft portions to the deal. A hard portion was they needed to have their [plutonium] program frozen, and under inspection, and they needed to re-can the spent fuel so it wasn’t reprocessed. That was done.

Did they hold to their end of the agreement in that sense?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And on our side, in terms of the hard part, so did we. We were obligated to create an entity called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, an international entity — which was really South Korea, Japan and the United States and eventually the European Union — to build these 2,000-megawatt light-water reactors. That was a hard point in terms of the deal and we were doing that.

We also had to deliver a quantity every year of something called heavy fuel oil to provide energy replacement for what they were giving up with not having their own nuclear facilities. And did we meet every delivery schedule on the day? No. Did we generally meet the schedule, and were we generally providing what we said we’d provide? Yes. So in terms of the hard performance under the framework, both sides were doing it.

But there was the political opening and the economic opening. The lifting of sanctions. The establishment of liaison offices.

Sure. Liaison offices were not established, but not because we weren’t willing to. We were quite willing to. In fact, we had foreign service officers pulled out of rotation and prepared for that. It was the North Koreans that figured out: A) We were not going to have a huge operation up there that we would pay them for, instead, we were gonna use part of the old German Embassy, and B) They were gonna have to have a high bill to pay here in Washington. And they had other reasons why they were reluctant. So the liaison offices didn’t happen, but it wasn’t our fault.

Second, with respect to the economic opening, lifting of sanctions, that’s the area in which they didn’t get the pay-off that they thought they’d get. But nothing that you could nail and say, this is what the framework says we didn’t perform. We were not as forthcoming as they might have liked. This is not what I would call, to use the current language, a “material breach.” A phrase which by the way, doesn’t apply to the framework which isn’t even a legal agreement.

I think the important thing to focus on in the Clinton administration is, after they tested a ballistic missile of extended range on August 31, 1998, and in the same summer were discovered to have what we thought might be secret sites, we got the North Koreans to allow us to visit one particular site and determine that they were not cheating at that site. And we also got the North Koreans to unilaterally announce a moratorium on ballistic missile tests.

These admissions are from our side. Who knows what it looked like to North Korea?

Public Radio International (PRI) has the article The Netherlands, always vulnerable to floods, has a new approach to water management.

Ten years ago, the Netherlands developed the concept of “room for the rivers,” which Zevenbergen calls a “paradigm shift.” “The room for the rivers concept is a turning point in our approach,” he explains.

One of the difficulties that many countries face is in financing projects.

As always, funding massive projects presents challenges, even when the stakes are so high. Recently, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) held a conference which directly addressed how to engage the finance sector and the water sector.

The World Bank estimates that investing a dollar in flood protection saves $7 to $10 in flood damage, but, “for some reason,” Zevenbergen says, “there is an investment gap. … The money cannot find the projects, and the projects cannot find the money.”

A country like the USA that is sovereign in its own currency and has little debt that is not denominated in that currency does not face these financing problems. We have much greater leeway to create the money necessary to finance these projects.

Below is Naomi Klein’s video that was an afterthought in the previous post Harvey Didn’t Come Out of the Blue. Now is the Time to Talk About Climate Change.

The Intercept has Naomi Klein’s article Harvey Didn’t Come Out of the Blue. Now is the Time to Talk About Climate Change.

Talking honestly about what is fueling this era of serial disasters — even while they’re playing out in real time — isn’t disrespectful to the people on the front lines. In fact, it is the only way to truly honor their losses, and our last hope for preventing a future littered with countless more victims.

Naomi Klein didn’t even mention that absence of any zoning laws in Houston exacerbated the flooding tremendously. There are no rules preventing developers from paving over wetlands that would have sopped up a lot of this water. I am not saying that zoning laws could have prevented Harvey, but I am saying that it could have lessened the damage. Or do we now think that lessening the damage is not a proper function of government?

To back up my comment about zoning, you have to read the Green News Update article Hell and High Water Predicted Houston Disaster.

First, it’s important to know that Houston – the fourth largest city in the U.S. –has no zoning. Yes, that’s right. Developers have a basically free hand in acquiring sites and installing subdivisions or commercial development in the burgeoning Houston region. There are virtually no development regulations, and developers often sue successfully to get their way!

Houston’s lack of zoning laws has been notorious since I lived in Dallas in 1969. We knew back then that this lack of zoning would come back to bite them someday. We just didn’t know how.

Governing has the article How a Far Left Candidate Won in a Deep Red State.

The new mayor of Jackson, Miss., may offer striking evidence of a nationwide trend.

This is the beginning of my research into Jackson, Mississippi. My interest was keeked by comments of Ajamu Baraka in the previous post On Contact: Agenda of Hate with Ajamu Baraka.

The article on Jackson in Wikipedia has a rather ironic first topic after the introduction.

The region that is now the city of Jackson was historically part of the large territory occupied by the Choctaw Nation, the historic culture of the Muskogean-speaking indigenous peoples who had inhabited the area for thousands of years before European encounter.
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Under pressure from the U.S. government, the Choctaw Native Americans agreed to removal after 1830 from all of their lands east of the Mississippi River under the terms of several treaties.