dealing with the world like dealing with the colombian cartels....

In the late 1970s Donald Trump, in his early thirties, cocky as ever and recently married to Ivana in 1977, could be seen on and off hitting the electric New York City night life especially at glamour/hard partying disco dive Studio 54.

Pepe Escobar: Dancing to Trump’s Disco Inferno

A certified dancefloor killer at Studio 54 was Disco Inferno by The Trammps, mixed by dance wizard Tom Moulton, released in 1976, two years before perennial Trump favorite YMCA – now resuscitated to global furor as the soundtrack to Trump 2.0 dance moves.

For all practical purposes, Trump is now the DJ turning the whole planet into a Disco Inferno (“folks are screaming, out of control”), as everything is “so entertaining when the boogie started to explode”. And the Trump “boogie” serially exploding is no less than the non-stop amplified sound of theater, bombast and uncontrolled chaos.

The spectacle of Trump’s sound and fury - a torrent of executive orders, photo ops, carefully scripted illusionist tricks, breathless headlines - signifying…something veils the same old imperial mindset, now blasting out in the open as a weaponized three-ring circus. Stagecraft invariably trumps substance as every smirk and scowl is media-weaponized to the enthralled, bloodthirsty arena spectators.

Mr. Disco Inferno won a mini-trade war with Colombia in only 10 hours, after posting an image depicting himself as an Al Capone-style Mafia boss in pinstripe suit and fedora hat, standing next to a sign that reads “FAFO”, which means “F**k Around and Find Out”.

He will win the proxy war in Ukraine. In 24 hours. Sorry, in 100 days. Sorry, maybe more. And “if they don't settle this war soon, like almost immediately, I'm going to put massive tariffs on Russia and massive taxes and also big sanctions.” Why? Because, "you know, I love the Russian people.”

He brags that the United States “has the largest amount of oil and gas” (it does not) and is going to use it; he will “ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down oil prices” (they will say no); because if “the oil price came down, the war in Ukraine would end immediately” (this is definitely not a “cause and effect” case).

He will make “the largest tax cuts in US history.” The US can ensure LNG supplies to Europe (of course, at a huge mark-up); the US “does not need Canada to make cars, as well as Canadian oil and gas”;the United States’ “massive oil and gas reserves” will allow it to “become a manufacturing superpower and the world capital of AI and cryptocurrencies”.

Buried in the sound and fury is the fact that the US can count on a steady stream of gas for domestic needs but that turns problematic when it comes to exports. Hence the expropriation obsession – as in outright Empire of Plunder: the US badly needs Iraqi, Syrian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Iranian and Russian reserves. Because even if carefully exported, there is insufficient liquification facilities in the US to supply the EU. And that’s why Europe remains largely dependent on Russian LNG and other sources since the sabotage of the Nordstreams.

PEPE ESCOBAR: PUTIN SENT TRUMP A DIRECT MESSAGE THAT RUSSIA’S DOOR IS OPEN FOR TALKS

Brazilian geopolitical analyst, Sputnik columnist Pepe Escobar:

Vladimir Putin’s remarks that Russia’s door is open to restoring relations with the US can be interpreted as a “direct… https://t.co/XGiBwhs8F8 pic.twitter.com/ZNaonsuWKP

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) November 8, 2024

Satisfaction…came in a chain reaction

Yes: there is incoming blood on the dancefloor. To get into the real groove of Disco Inferno, we might as well focus on the top three challenges for Trump 2.0: the tech war against China; the geoeconomics war against the Global Majority; and the proxy war in Ukraine.

The irruption of Hangzhou-based Chinese tech start-up DeepSeek on the global stage was something for the ages, instantly decimating the spun-to-death “small yard, high fence” American strategy to smash China’s tech advances.

DeepSeek should indeed be seen as the “biggest dark horse” in the open-source Large Language Model (LLM) domain, now identified from Jakarta to Wall Street and Silicon Valley as potentially Beijing’s secret weapon in the AI war with the US. Even Mr. Disco Inferno was forced to admit DeepSeek’s breakthrough as a “wake-up call”.

At the heart of the matter we find two clashing models: neoliberal hypercapitalism versus meritocratic socialism.

The head of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng, is a fascinating geek. His given name (Wenfeng) means “Vanguard of Culture”; one of the meanings of his family name (Liang) is “bridge”. So he may be seen – as he is in China – as Mr. Bridge to the Vanguard of Culture (here’s Mr. Bridge in an excellent interview , in Chinese; please use auto-translate).

Mr. Bridge pulled a spectacular Sun Tzu on US sanctions over exporting advanced graphic processing units (GPUs), especially Nvidia’s advanced chips. Moreover, Chinese Big Tech firms cannot compete with the financial firepower of US Big Tech.

So the answer was to develop cost-efficient powerful LLM models, without access to literally hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H100s chips. DeepSeek stated they had used just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and only $5.6million to train a model with 671 billion (italics mine) parameters: that’s a very small fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train models of the same size.

And everything was developed locally, via scores of PHDs from the top Chinese universities - Peking, Tsinghua, Beihang – and not American Ivy League experts.

So in a nutshell DeepSeek is a 100% Chinese LLM companywhich was capable to come up with open-source models and a free downloadable app for every consumer to use. That in itself destroys the current American-imposed neoliberal hypercapitalist AI business model.

The rules of the game indeed are being rewritten. So what is the – predictable - American response? Call for more sanctions. In parallel, DeepSeek was forced to suspend new registrations because its site suffered a massive cyberattack. Talk about the price to pay for eviscerating a humongous $1 trillion off the techno-feudalists gathered at the New York Stock Exchange.

Mr. Disco Inferno of course supports the commodifying of all data compared to free data for everyone. Right before the DeepSeek shock, he had - theoretically - secured as much as $1 trillion from the Saudis, including to a large extent investments to develop AI and data centers in the US.

The new game of course is just beginning. Stargate, OpenAI’s joint venture with Japan’s SoftBank, also heavily plugged by Trump, plans to spend at least $100 billion on AI infrastructure in the US. In parallel, Elon Musk’s xAI is massively expanding the Colossus supercomputer to contain more than 1million GPUs to help train its Grok AI models.

I couldn't get enough, so I had to self-destruct

Now to the war against the Global Majority. Inestimable Prof. Michael Hudson is adamant: in an absolutely must read essay, he concisely explains that “when Trump promised his voters that the United States must be the ‘winner’ in any international trade or financial agreement, he is declaring economic war on the rest of the world.”

The key Hudson take away: If nations in the Global South are to save their economy “from being plunged into austerity, price inflation, unemployment and social chaos”, they will have to “suspend payments on foreign debts denominated in dollars.”

It’s a work in progress: “Circumstances…are forcing the world to break away from the US-centered financial order. The US dollar’s exchange rate is going to soar in the short term as a result of Trump blocking imports with tariffs and trade sanctions. This exchange-rate shift will squeeze foreign countries owing dollar debts in the same way that Mexico and Canada are to be squeezed. To protect themselves, they must suspend dollar debt service.”

There may be serious problems ahead for Mr. Disco Inferno: “Trump’s America First political theater that got him elected may get his gang unseated as the contradictions and consequences of their operating philosophy are recognized and replaced. His tariff policy will accelerate US price inflation and, even more fatally, cause chaos in US and foreign financial markets. Supply chains will be disrupted, interrupting US exports of everything from aircraft to information technology. And other countries will find themselves obliged to make their economies no longer dependent on US exports or dollar credit.”

Prof. Hudson notes how Trump “thinks that the US economy is like a cosmic black hole, that is, a center of gravity able to pull all the world’s money and economic surplus to itself. That is the explicit aim of America First. That is what makes Trump’s program a declaration of economic war on the rest of the world. There is no longer a promise that the economic order sponsored by US diplomacy will make other countries prosperous. The gains from trade and foreign investment are to be sent to and concentrated in America.”

The EU, in the Global North, is even more vulnerable to “America First”. Davos came and went with a mere blip on the screen, apart from the odd US banker bragging about “peak pessimism” in Europe – linked to the incoming Trump tariff tsunami – and head of the European Central Bank Christine “Look at my new Hermes scarf” Lagarde wondering it was “not pessimistic” to say that Europe is facing an “existential crisis”.

The US-EU trade balance stands at a hefty 1.5 trillion euros a year, including massive Atlanticist investment flows. But what really matters is the financial mess in individual EU nations, especially top two Germany and France, with their Via Dolorosa to be extended ad infinitum when it comes to their cost of borrowing driven by tax cuts in the US.

I heard somebody say (Burning Burning) burn that mother down

And now to the Forever Wars front.

Mr. Disco Inferno, posing as a humanitarian for the non-stop camera clicking, has asked vassals Jordan and Egypt to de facto become accomplices in ethnic cleansing, absorbing as many as 1.5 million people from Gaza. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly “prohibits the forced transfer of protected people out of or into occupied territory”.

Turning a genocide into a real estate opportunity in a “phenomenal location” will proceed in parallel with energetically courting the Saudis, after MbS in Riyadh promised last week to invest at least $600 billion – and up to a possible $1 trillion – in the US.

The official Saudi position is on the necessity of “strategic investments” to “stabilize long-term revenue streams” – not to mention consolidate lavish spending on all those US-made weapons systems. Call it a classic geopolitical case of Power of Capital merging with The Strategy of Chaos.

Telling Riyadh how to dance is one thing. To entice the Russian bear to the dancefloor is a completely different proposition.

As star French historian Emmanuel Todd has brilliantly demonstrated , “Trump’s job will be to manage the defeat of the US against Russia.” That’s the toughest call ever. Trump’s supreme anathema is to be seen as a loser.

So there are only two feasible options.

1. To “end the war” by not really ending it, just postponing it to the end of the decade, stealing a de facto Russian victory via massive spin and a gargantuan P.R. campaign.

2. Keep weaponizing Kiev – especially via NATO vassals, while posing as a peacemaker who cannot deliver because of Russia. That will be a toxic variant of the current “war until the last Ukrainian”.

That kind of gimmickry won’t fly in Moscow. Putin and the Security Council have made it extensively clear the conditions for a real end to the war – not a pause for NATO rearmament.

The authentic-or-not 100-day plan for a possible deal that has been circulating in the Washington-London-Kiev echo chambers touches on a few probabilities: a Putin-Trump phone call in the next two weeks or so; a possible meeting, bilateral (Trump-Putin) or trilateral (with the Ukrainian actor; quite unlikely) until mid-March; start of negotiations on the main parameters; a possible ceasefire by Easter; an International Peace Conference by the end of April, mediated by US, China, some EU members and some from the Global South; presidential elections in Ukraine at the end of August.

Key parameters: Ukraine as a neutral state, and not a member of NATO; member of the EU by 2030; Ukraine does not reduce the size of the army; does not officially recognize Russian sovereignty over conquered territories; “some” sanctions against Russia lifted immediately after the conclusion of the peace agreement, some - over the course of three years - depending on Russia's compliance; all restrictions on the import of Russian energy to the EU to be lifted; and last but not least, the thorny matter of a “European peacekeeping contingent”.

The CIA is feeding all sorts of misinformation to Trump on everything from the real state of things in the battlefield to the state of the Russian economy. As it stands, Russians watch all the bombast with barely a smirk. Peskov: “Moscow still hasn’t received word from Washington about possible Trump, Putin contact… Readiness for meeting remains.”

So far, nothing. Totally empty game playing. Perhaps Trump, in secrecy, may be practicing his master shot: “The heat was on, rising to the top / Everybody going strong, and that is when my spark got hot”.

Time to hit the dancefloor.

(Just can't stop) when my spark gets hot

Well, it may turn out that the really hot spark will be detonated not by Mr. Disco Inferno, but by dance partner Vladimir Putin.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20250128/pepe-escobar-dancing-to-trumps-disco-inferno-1121513139.html

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Gus Leonisky

POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE SINS OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME AMERICA.

BACK IN 2011...

Real estate mogul and reality TV personality Donald Trump has quit the Republican Party to register as an independent, opening the way for a potential outsider run at the White House.
Trump made the switch on Thursday, his lawyer, Michael Cohen, told The Hill political news website.
Trump did this "in order to preserve his right to run as an independent ... if he is not satisfied with whom the candidate is", Cohen told The Hill.

vanished liberals....

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Where Have All the Liberals Gone?

I simply cannot figure American liberals and “progressives”—’pwogwessives,’” as the late Alexander Cockburn used to call them.

They do nothing when faced with calamitous events and call it hard work. Then, when the political process (such as it is) takes a radical turn for the worse and there is serious work to do, they announce that they are exhausted and must “take a break” from it all.

And then they go off to Mexico City or Barbados or the Cotswolds.

Can’t figure it. When the going gets tough, liberals get… tickets to Santorini or Sicily.

I propose a brief investigation of the conduct of liberals during the Biden years and now, as Donald Trump takes office, not as a matter of ridicule, although at this point there is much in the culture of American liberalism that is ridiculous. No, my concern lies in the larger implications of what amounts to mass frivolity.

Liberals have never struck me as a very reliable lot. Their stated positions and “values”— a ridiculous word in its own right — are by tradition always of the highest order. But they so frequently and predictably cave to reaction.

Cold War liberals proved the worst in this regard: Ever prepared were they, whenever authentic political principles were challenged, to line up behind conservative Cold Warriors.

O.K., there is a long, unfortunate history here. But since the Clinton years in the 1990s, matters have taken another turn. Capitulation itself has become the position, the value.

This became perfectly obvious once Hillary Clinton — warmonger, interventionist, cultivator of coups, all-around authoritarian — assumed a prominent voice among liberal elites. Since the 2016 political season, and one can scarcely fail to notice, liberals have vigorously favored … wars, interventions, coups, censorship, a certain apple-pie authoritarianism.

They count the military and “the intelligence community”— a term that reflects the liberal embrace — their allies and friends. They are, in a phrase, the direct descendants of the Cold War liberals of decades past.

I have this acute urge to write the following sentence. American liberals trust the Central Intelligence Agency.

Clean, simple, bald and bold, irrefutable. Just seven words give a useful idea of how far things have gone. And you will know now what I mean by ridiculous.

The Biden regime’s four years in power and Trump’s election last November cause us to mix an alloy of ridiculous with critical, maybe even grave, as we characterize the culture of liberals.

We have witnessed in this period the collapse even of the weak, drowsy liberalism of the past. I see a qualitative difference I mean to say, between the liberalism of yore and what has become of liberalism these past years.

Liberalism as we find it out our windows seems now to consist of little more than performance and signifiers. You have posturing and authorized speech, and you have consumption patterns certified as a sort of semiology by way of liberal media.

Look at any day’s edition of The New York Times: What are effectively latter-day Good Housekeeping seals of approval—“T–shirts we love,” the right olive oil, “our favorite banana bread” — are considerably privileged above anything resembling serious news as measured in column inches.

And you have above all, the rest being subsets, a shockingly submissive worship of authority. And this, in turn, induces among liberals something between a refusal to act and an inability to act, a paralysis.

You could read liberalism’s slide in the direction of the supercilious in all those supposedly panicked cries as Trump’s momentum gathered during the 2024 political season. Fascist, tyrant, totalitarian, dictatorship, and above all, an existential threat to democracy: It was all very grave, historic in magnitude.

But I had to wonder what all the people saying these things were doing about so menacing a prospect as a second Trump term. I couldn’t find much; it was all signification. Saying was somehow sufficient, all that needed doing by way of political action.

Turning the matter another way, while there were great reservoirs of alarm about the prospect of a Trump presidency, and setting aside the principled minority who demonstrated on university campuses and elsewhere, liberals seemed to have little to say as Joe Biden dragged the United States into a genocide.

Where were these people? I still want to know.

It was good enough by way of action, it turned out, to pull the lever for Kamala Harris last Nov. 5 — this even as she endorsed Israeli terror as openly as the president.

Routines of Entitlement

I had to laugh after the election when a conservative commentator whose name I cannot recall wondered in print why all the liberals flinging around “fascist,” “dictator,” “tyrant,” and so on hadn’t taken to the hills in the manner of the old French maquisards — you know, the wartime guerrillas who gave up work and family to wage armed actions and sabotage ops against the Nazi Wehrmacht from mountain hideouts where they subsisted on leaves and weeds.

Such a vacuum of silence and what amounts to indolence.

Ridiculous is as ridiculous does not, I say. How can you take seriously people who tell you that they now live under a fascist dictatorship while going about their business entirely per usual?

Maybe the word I seek is infantilization — the infantilization of liberalism. Is there a better term for what has become of liberals since Trump’s ascendancy?

At the very moment, according to the liberal narrative, political action of a great variety is urgent in the cause of saving our republic, the new liberal consensus, born of a shared “exhaustion,” is that it is time to “tune out,” or “take a break,” or simply close one’s eyes and ears.

How many news reports have I read to this effect? Politico: “The resistance is not coming to save you. It’s tuning out.” The Associated Press: “Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new poll show they’re tuning out.”

And from The New York Times: “Certain kinds of left-leaning, reflective New Yorkers declare… they were drained, exhausted, resigned, ready to choose a plaintive ignorance.”

I just love the Times some mornings. Reflective New Yorkers — left-wing, of course — retreating honorably into ignorance. You just can’t beat this kind of thing.

Bingeing on chocolate, watching British crime dramas morn ’til night, people wearing themselves out on treadmills: Move over to social media and you discover all sorts of close-to-the-ground modes of escape. And then, of course, you have the virtuous travelers.

You have to have clearance to indulge in this kind of thing, let us be clear. You have to have the sanction of a new liberal consensus, and these come thick and fast nowadays, a new consensus every time you look. Worry not, liberals: the Times is once again here for you.

This is Charles Blow, the arch-liberal Times columnist, in a piece that appeared in the Dec. 18 editions under the headline, “Temporarily Disconnected from Politics?”:

“Should anyone feel guilt for choosing not to constantly ruminate or pre-emptively panic? For choosing to take a breath and a beat before re-engaging in the fight… that is almost surely in the offing once Donald Trump returns to power?

Absolutely not.”

Re-engaging with the fight? What fight was that? He must mean voting the “Joy and Vibes” ticket in the polling booth last November. I gather from all this it was exhausting.

The now evident consensus — see what I mean? Another one — is that so long as the liberal American feels the right feelings, the approved feelings, it is sufficient: There is no need actually to do anything. Nothing can be permitted to break the liberal’s routines of entitlement.

And we find, too, a flat refusal to address or even acknowledge the half of America that, having put Donald Trump in office, does not conform to the liberal version of reality.

This is what I read in the sudden impulse to travel: It is a flinch, a turning away, nothing more. Anything to avoid recognizing the grievances of the non-liberal majority, anything to avoid facing the true composition of the American polity, anything to protect the liberal bubble from a puncture.

How did it come to this? Again, I cannot figure it. Scholars now debate the future of American liberalism and whether it can be salvaged or salvage itself to serve some useful purpose in the polity. I cannot figure this, either.

I do not like to think of liberals as representative of anyone other than themselves, but to the extent they may reflect anything close to prevailing sentiment in America their conduct of late saddens me. Are we a nation so pathetic as they?

Are we lost, as they seem to be, in memes and narrative dreams that seal us protectively from reality and relieve us of all responsibility to act?

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/29/patrick-lawrence-where-have-all-the-liberals-gone/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Gus Leonisky

POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

By Gus Leonisky at 30 Jan 2025 - 8:07pm
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dealing with the world like dealing with the colombian cartels....

vanished liberals....

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