Geopolitics/Geoeconomics Thread - June 2015

[drnayar]

Instead of playing the China-US balance game, it would help us better if we can work with factions within America that are more pro-India comparatively. Recognize whatever groups in the SD/DS are pushing anti India agenda, and extend support to relatively better options, helping them get to power.

We need good flows and integbration with US economy for our growth to continue. We shouldn't help Chinese in anyway just to get back to the US as a whole. We also lose in that scenario. We need to cultivate strong relations with Americans, who can back pro India policy in all speheres-military, political, academia.... We already are seeing some engagemnt with Republican/Conservative meetups recently, where Ram Madhav and Swapan Dasgupta spoke.

An enemy who pretends to be a friend is worse than an enemy. America is worse than China.

[ernest]

An enemy who pretends to be a friend is worse than an enemy. America is worse than China.

America is not a monolith. Even if it is an enemy, we don't benefit from going head-on against it. Better to exploit its fractures, just like US explores 'subnational' movements elsewhere. That is what China has done without losing a man to America.

[ramana]

(This is translated from social media Hindi to English. Why India is a target.)
“Professor Graham Allison of Harvard University believes an established force in the international world would want to stop an emerging power from standing equal to it. If the rising force attempts to challenge the established force then the consequences are war that restores the connection between those forces.

He studied 16 situations in the last 500 years that rapidly increased power of an emerging nation that an established nation took as a challenge toward its power. 12 out of these 16 positions resulted in war.

This situation was named Professor Alison Thucydides Trap or Thucydides Trap that doesn't require description in this article.

Professor Allison reminded that U.S. military forces intervened in the western world on more than 30 different opportunities to tackle Americans-friendly economic or regional disputes, or throw protesting leaders out of power.

Professor Allison concludes that China is an emerging force, challenging an established force, America. So the possibility of war between these two nations increases.

Professor Alison's theory should also be seen in context of India.

After PM Modi came to power, the steps taken by him have started to flourish in powerful nations. Roads, bridges and other infrastructures being constructed at the border; modern weapons being given to the army; emphasis on self-reliant India; refusing to join neighboring country's belt and road programs; establishing itself as a force in the world in the field of sun energy Doing; Navy dominating the Indian Ocean; Buying oil from Russia; All these policies are a concern for today's bold countries.

These powers know they did not challenge the Red Country in time which made the Red Country established as a superpower from under their nose.

But now such bold countries do not want to repeat this "mistake" in the context of India.

For this reason, there has been a policy of support to terrorists in the name of freedom of expression, tension over trade and terrorists have been adopted. The situation of Bangladesh we are seeing.

Indian leadership knows about Thucydides Trap and he is stepping into nation hit.

That's why PM Modi said to the Red Fort campaign on this Independence Day that as we become stronger, challenges are about to rise as our attention increases. Outside challenges are about to grow and I have a good style.

But I want to say such forces that India's development does not bring crisis for anyone. Even though we were prosperous in the world, we have never wrapped the world into war. We are the country of Buddha, war is not our path. And so world don't worry, by India's moving forward I assure world community that you understand India's culture, understand India's thousands years history, you don't consider us crisis, you don't connect with the tricks which causes the whole mankind The land in which the ability to do welfare has to work harder.

No matter how many challenges are, it is in the nature of India to challenge the challenge. Neither will we fall, nor will we get tired, nor will we stop, nor will we bend.

PM Modi knows what happened in Bangladesh. They have given a message to the bold countries.

Amit Singhal”
Original
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/WBXPHx ... tid=WC7FNe

[chetak]

The elephant in the room

If you think that by ignoring it or worse, accommodating it as a gesture of peace, it will go away, or be pacified, think again

this is now being pushed as part of the amriki "democracy" package labelled "islamophobia" which the jihadis are demanding be legitimized by international law

how was israel drowned out so seamlessly by palestine in the amriki narrative, and supported so strongly by brainwashed white idiots

the bleddy ivy leaguers in amrika and their poisonously woke ecosystem of suborned commie intellectuals, fuelled for long by jihadi money, were the first to fall

that is realpolitik, in which geopolitics, nourished and sustained by jihadi led geoeconomics, continues to play its insidious part in the changed narrative of the amriki academia, that is spilling over into the commie led jihadi conditioning of the amriki political space

India doesn't need to look far, it's staring us in the face from just across the border, if one cared to look into that cesspool of a jizya imposing country run by the jihadi beedis

there is a socio cultural religious version of the thucydides trap, run by the abrahamics, that has been playing out on the Indian civilization for the longest time and now that war is being brought to our own doorstep, via manipur, beediland, KER, TN, PUN, and AP just to name a few stress points

[sanman]

[bala]

In this key lesson of how to slap and roast egregious journalists and pseudo questions from BBC, EAM Jaishankar handles the barrage of questions with great aplomb. View at leisure this YT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sbAc-H3J_I

Full YT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQwaRvvPmFE

Oil strategy to buy oil than any political strategy
Embracing one another is part of Indian culture compared to the Britshit way of being clipped accent, mean and haughty.

Meanwhile Modi ji's comments on Ukraine visit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7S2HcaAUjA

[ramana]

Koerber Institue, Germnay Policy Game report on
European security order for 2030

https://koerber-stiftung.de/site/assets ... r_2030.pdf

[Amber G.]

India-Ukraine Joint Statement on the Visit of Prime Minister of India to Ukraine

[Pratyush]

Koerber Institue, Germnay Policy Game report on
European security order for 2030

https://koerber-stiftung.de/site/assets ... r_2030.pdf

It interesting that they are seeing an end to the war in Ukraine. But they are unable to conceive a place for Russia in the security architecture.

The primary cause of the war in Ukraine to begin with.

[drnayar]

[sanman]

^^^
Please move that discussion to the Geopolitical thread.

So my belief is that this Kursk incursion is Washington's stunt -- ie. Washington NeoCons are invading Russia using Ukrainians as puppet henchmen.

Ukrainians are basically hostage to whatever their masters in Washington want. Their troops are stupid enough to drink whatever Kool-Aid that Zelensky and his Washington masters give them.

The Washington NeoCons are mainly focused on the November US elections, which could cause them to lose power.
They are desperate to avoid such an outcome which could leave them heavily exposed, as they have many skeletons in their closet.

All their stunts to continue on after November have all failed.
The assassination attempt on Trump has failed.
Now they're desperately grasping at their remaining levers & trying to use them.
The latest gambit is the biggest one yet: try to pre-empt the elections by trying to provoke WW3 by invading Russia.

In regards to US elections, which always happen in November, there's a well-known phrase called "October Surprise"
It refers to last-minute political stunts which get pulled by contestants to undermine each other.

In this extraordinary election cycle, expect more than one of those -- expect August Surprise, September Surprise, etc in addition to October Surprise.
I think Kursk Invasion was August Surprise.
What will September Surprise, etc be?

[sanman]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/2 ... -in-france

Telegram Messaging App CEO Pavel Durov Arrested in France


The French literally issued their arrest warrant just a few before his plane landed in Paris.

Washington's games?



Why can't India come up with a messaging app with its own coin?
Or can we extend UPI/RuPay from payment to integrate it with messaging?

[Mukesh.Kumar]

Albiet being named as Geopolitics/ Geoeconomics, most of the time on this tread we discuss geopolitics and ideology.

Whereas, in my understanding, it is economics which finally drive the complex dynamics within nations, between nations. When this version of the thread was started, Panduranghariji had pointed this out, in accord to which the thread was renamed from Geopolitics to Geopolitics/ Geoeconomics.

Ramana Saar,
It should be called Geo-Politics/Geo-Economics thread. All through history from antiquity to present, economics have determined political actions. Some actions have failed due to geography but without the economics backing the action, constraints could be/have been overcome. Sanjaya Baru in one of his talks also says this. There are many who would also agree.

Continuing in that spirit, I am posting an interesting article]I came across on Quora- Who are the families that control most of the world today? which explores the issue of concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals. While I am yet to check out all the points, and some really do sound far fetched, but overall it is worth looking at. I could find it connect some very interesting events and provide plausible answers to some questions I always had. Quoting the article in full as I am not sure if it can be pulled in future.

Who are the families that control most of the world today?
Dayanandh Pushparaj


Well I can talk about these forever. But I don't have patience to write a huge answer about why these families are so powerful despite not been known to common people. Below are some families that has influenced and influencing this world to beyond one's imagination.

The eight families include The Rothschilds, Morgans, Rockefellers, Warburgs, Kuhn Loebs, Lazards, Goldman Sachs and the Lehmans. The Rothschilds, Morgans and Rockefellers are the big three and others have been the major influence in establishing the connections between those 3 families. The Warburgs, Kuhn Loebs, Goldman Sachs, Schiffs and Rothschilds have intermarried into one big happy banking family. But you can also find relationships between every family at the moment.

The 8 families control the world as of now. Every major corporations, governments of entire western world and developing nations are literally controlled by them. They are not just bankers or financial firms. Much more than that. By 19th century Rothschilds were the world's wealthiest family involving in loans, government bonds and also started bullion trading. They also became the biggest stakeholders in most large scale mining and rail transports across Europe. After the revolution in 1848, they had huge impacts for good or bad. But they soon were able to establish a much larger system. Every war after that had their involvement in one way or the other. By the end of 19th century they made oil to be the fastest growing commodity in Europe.

On the other side of the world Junius Spencer inherited his father's money and after years founded Peabody, Morgan & Co along with its George Peabody. It became J.S.Morgan & Co after Peabody's retirement. Along with the help of his son J.P.Morgan they have started to grow in a rapid rate by selling war bonds during the civil war.

Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship. The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.

After death of J.S.Morgan in 1890, it became J.P.Morgan & Co. By then Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects.

A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold through Kuhn Loeb. By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US. The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By 1899 there were twelve-hundred.

Morgan and Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base. In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families. By now Rockefeller and Rothschilds were planning on monopolizing the entire oil industry. There was a huge outcry from the competitors. Under Sherman AntiTrust law Rockefeller's Standard oil was sued and pressed monopoly charges against them. Standard oil was broken into 34 companies after the judgment. The company would've been worth more than $1 trillion if the split never took place.

In 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip of National City (Citibank), Henry Davison of Morgan Bank, and Paul Warburg of the Kuhn, Loeb Investment House met secretly on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to formulate a plan for a US central bank, and created the Aldrich Plan, which called for a system of fifteen regional central banks, openly and directly controlled by Wall Street commercial banks. These banks would have the legal ability to create mnoney out of thin air and represented an attempt to create a new Bank of the United States. Public reaction was swift.
Due to the intense public opposition to the Aldrich Plan, the measure was defeated in the House of Representaives in 1912. One year later the bankers would be back!
Following the defeat of the Aldrich Plan, in 1913, the Private Central Bankers of Europe, in particular the Rothschilds of Great Britain and the Warburgs of Germany, met with their American financial collaborators once again on Jekyll Island, Georgia to form a new banking cartel with the express purpose of forcing the United States to accept a private central bank, with the aim of placing complete control of the United States money supply once again under the control of private bankers. Owing to hostility over the previous banks, the name was changed from the Third Bank of the United States to "The Federal Reserve" system in order to grant the new bank a quasi-governmental image, but in fact it is a privately owned bank, no more "Federal" than Federal Express.
Former Chairman of the FED Allan Greenspan admits the Federal Reserve is a private bank and answers to no government authority.

The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government. If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts. Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.

After the death of J.P. Morgan, the company fell in hands of Rockefeller and Rothschild with complete control. Although Jack Morgan was still operating at the top for J.P.Morgan & Co. Jack Morgan pushed the government into taking part in WWI while asking their clients Remington and Winchester to increase the production. Morgan also financed the British Boer War in South Africa and the Franco-Prussian War.

The World War One started, and it is important to remember that prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve, there was no such thing as a world war. World War One started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Although the war started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia it quickly shifted to focus on Germany, whose industrial capacity was seen as an economic threat to Great Britain, who saw the decline of the British Pound as a result of too much emphasis on financial activity to the neglect of agriculture, industrial development, and infrastructure (not unlike the present day United States). Although pre-war Germany had a private central bank, it was heavily restricted and inflation kept to reasonable levels. Under government control, investment was guaranteed to internal economic development, and Germany was seen as a major power. So, in the media of the day, Germany was portrayed as the prime opponent of World War One, and not just defeated, but its industrial base flattened. Following the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was ordered to pay the war costs of all the participating nations, even though Germany had not actually started the war. This amounted to three times the value of all of Germany itself. Germany's private central bank, to whom Germany had gone deeply into debt to pay the costs of the war, broke free of government control, and massive inflation followed (mostly triggered by currency speculators) , permanently trapping the German people in endless debt.

"Should Germany merchandise (do business) again in the next 50 years we have led this war (WW1) in vain." - Winston Churchill in The Times (1919)


“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” -Woodrow Wilson in 1919

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led both German and Allied reconstruction efforts.

Thomas Edison, arguably the most brilliant man of the age, was also well aware of the fraud of private central banks.

"People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold.
"Look at it another way. If the Government issues bonds, the brokers will sell them. The bonds will be negotiable; they will be considered as gilt edged paper. Why? Because the government is behind them, but who is behind the Government? The people. Therefore it is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have the benefit of their own gilt-edged credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency on Muscle Shoals, instead of the bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds?" -- Thomas A. Edison, New York Times, December 4, 1921


Under the orders of Jacob Schiff, Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921. CFR was solely to create free trade and globalization for the outside world. While these families had other ideas, bigger ones ofc. The CFR membership at the start was approximately 1000 people in the United States. This membership included the heads of virtually every industrial empire in America, all the American based international bankers, and the heads of all their tax-free foundations. In essence all those people who would provide the capital required for anyone who wished to run for Congress, the Senate or the Presidency. The first job of the CFR was to gain control of the press. This task was given to John D. Rockefeller who set up a number of national news magazines such as Lifeand Time. He financed Samuel Newhouse to buy up and establish a chain of newspapers all across the country, and Eugene Meyer also who would go on to buy up many publications such as the Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Weekly Magazine. The CFR also needed to gate control of radio, television and the motion picture industry. This task was split amongst the international bankers from, Kuhn Loeb, Goldman Sachs, the Warburgs, and the Lehmanns. The council has always been subject to numerous conspiracy theories is primarily due to the number of high-ranking government officials (along with world business leaders and prominent media figures) in its membership and the large number of aspects of American foreign policy that its members have been involved with.

There had been occasions when central banks had found it useful to cooperate with one another in order to facilitate international settlements. But this had happened only in exceptional circumstances. After the first world war, however, and especially during the currency stabilizations of the period 1922-1930, he principal central banks frequently joined forces for the purpose of granting special "stabilization credits" either in connection with the reconstruction work undertaken by the Financial Committee of the League of Nations or independently of these schemes.

It was therefore natural enough that the monetary and political authorities (Rockefellers and Rothschilds in particular) soon became interested in the idea of substituting for such ad-hoc and temporary associations a more permanent system of cooperation.

This idea took practical shape in the course of the negotiations on the
problem of reparations owed by Germany after the first world war.
These resulted in what became known as the Young Plan, which provided for a reduction (as compared with the earlier Dawes Plan) and also a "commercialization" of the annuities to be paid by Germany and made possible, moreover, the partial mobilization of these annuities through the issue of international loans. It was deemed necessary for the attainment of this purpose that an international organization should be set up possessing official status and at the same time sufficiently commercial in character to be independent of political considerations and able to work in direct contact with the financial markets.

It was therefore decided to create, under the name of "Bank for International Settlements,"* an international bank to be founded by the principal central banks of the countries involved, whose permanent function would be to promote cooperation between central banks and to facilitate international financial settlements and to which could also be entrusted the task of executing the Young Plan as the agent of the governments concerned

When one utilizes the axiom, “Follow the money,” all roads lead to the Rothschilds and their formula of gaining control of a nation’s money supply and then making all the rules. In the process of gaining control of a nation’s money supply, each country’s gold holdings were ransacked, and in the case of the US, the then world’s largest silver holdings were also stolen.

US Treasury Notes that were specie backed by silver and gold. After the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, the privately owned Federal Reserve bank, began circulating Federal Reserve Notes that were also specie-backed, to circulate alongside US -issued Treasury Notes until the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday.” The US was forced into bankruptcy by the Rothschild elites, and the banks were reopened under direct control of the Federal Reserve central bank. What was little noticed was that the specie-backing of gold and silver for the Federal Reserve Noted were quietly withdrawn. At the same time, specie backed US Treasury Notes were withdrawn from circulation and destroyed! The Rothschilds will not accept any competition. The first stage of the world’s largest Ponzi scheme succeeded. Next was the removal and eventual suppression of the price of gold, an ongoing activity by central banks.

In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others profited from the Crash of 1929. House Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY) said of the Great Depression, “It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all”.

In 1930, The first Rothschild world bank, the, “Bank for International Settlements (BIS),” is established in Basle, Switzerland. Ironically the first president of BIS was the Rockefeller banker Gates J. McGarrah was also Chairman at Federal Reserve and an official at Chase-Manhattan.

Historian Carroll Quigley says BIS was part of a plan, “to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements.” In 1933, Wall Street bankers and financiers including Prescott Bush ofc had bankrolled the successful coups by both Hitler and Mussolini. Brown Brothers Harriman in New York was financing Hitler right up to the day war was declared with Germany.The Wall Street bankers decided that a fascist dictatorship in the United States based on the one on Italy would be far better for their business interests than Roosevelt's "New Deal" which threatened massive wealth re-distribution to recapitalize the working and middle class of America. So the Wall Street tycoons recruited General Butler to lead the overthrow of the US Government and install a "Secretary of General Affairs" who would be answerable to Wall Street and not the people, would crush social unrest and shut down all labor unions. General Butler pretended to go along with the scheme but then exposed the plot to Congress.

Congress, then as now in the pocket of the Wall Street bankers, refused to act. When Roosevelt learned of the planned coup he demanded the arrest of the plotters, but the plotters simply reminded Roosevelt that if any one of them were sent to prison, their friends on Wall Street would deliberatly collapse the still-fragile economy and blame Roosevelt for it. Roosevelt was thus unable to act until the start of WW2, at which time he prosecuted many of the plotters under the Trading With The Enemy act. The Congressional minutes into the coup were finally declassified in 1967, but rumors of the attempted coup became the inspiration for the movie, "Seven Days in May" but with the true financial villains erased from the script.

When the Weimar Republic collapsed economically, it opened the door for the National Socialists to take power. BIS became a conduit to fund Hitler's Germany in reconstruction and rebuilding their nation. Swiss banking secrecy laws are reformed and it becomes an offence resulting in imprisonment for any bank employee to violate bank secrecy. This is all in preparation for the Rothschild engineered Second World War in which as usual they will fund both sides. Their first financial move was to issue their own state currency which was not borrowed from private central bankers. Freed from having to pay interest on the money in circulation, Germany blossomed and quickly began to rebuild its industry. Once again, Germany's industrial output became a threat to Great Britain.

"Not the political doctrine of Hitler has hurled us into this war. The reason was the success of his increase in building a new economy. The roots of war were envy, greed and fear." -- Major General J.F.C. Fuller, historian, England


Germany's state-issued value based currency was also a direct threat to the wealth and power of the private central banks, and as early as 1933 they started to organize a global boycott against Germany to strangle this upstart ruler who thought he could break free of private central bankers!


President Roosevelt takes America into the second world war in 1941 by refusing to sell Japan any more steel scrap or oil. Japan was in the midst of a war against China and without that scrap steel and oil, Japan would be unable to continue that war. Japan was totally dependent upon the United States for both steel scrap and oil. Roosevelt knew this action would provoke the Japanese to attack America, which they subsequently did at Pearl Harbor.
Prescott Bush, father of future American Presidents’ George Herbert Walker and George W, has his company seized under the, “Trading With The Enemy,” Act. He was funding Hitler from America, whilst American soldiers were being killed by German soldiers. Jews are also being slaughtered by these same soldiers. Interestingly the ADL never criticizes any of the Bushes for this.

Albeft Einstein was of the opinion that the late entry of the US into the war against Germany was because the US was controlled by bankers who were making money off of Hitler.

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By the end of second world war all the families wanted a complete financial power shift from Britain to the US. So two further international banks, IMF and the World Bank, were set up along with the second 'League of Nations', United Nations. Only this time these two banks have larger control than BIS so the activity of BIS during war time shall remain in the shadow. The IMF and the World Bank still depend on the Federal Reserve and central banks.

The IMF was originally designed to promote international economic cooperation and provide its member countries with short term loans so they could trade with other countries (achieve balance of payments). Since the debt crisis of the 1980's, the IMF has assumed the role of bailing out countries during financial crises (caused in large part by currency speculation in the global casino economy) with emergency loan packages tied to certain conditions, often referred to as structural adjustment policies (SAPs). The IMF now acts like a global loan shark, exerting enormous leverage over the economies of more than 60 countries. These countries have to follow the IMF's policies to get loans, international assistance, and even debt relief. Thus, the IMF decides how much debtor countries can spend on education, health care, and environmental protection. The IMF is one of the most powerful institutions on Earth -- yet few know how it works.​ Best Example is Argentina. Their model was appreciated by IMF and World Bank. Within months they found themselves in huge financial crisis and had them ask for support from IMF/World Bank. Simply they have the power to induce a bad economy in any country at any given time.

As President, John F. Kennedy understood the predatory nature of private central banking. He understood why Andrew Jackson fought so hard to end the Second Bank of the United States. So Kennedy wrote and signed Executive Order 11110 which ordered the US Treasury to issue a new public currency, the United States Note. Kennedy's United States Notes were not borrowed from the Federal Reserve but created by the US Government and backed by the silver stockpiles held by the US Government. It represented a return to the system of economics the United States had been founded on, and was perfectly legal for Kennedy to do. All told, some four and one half billion dollars went into public circulation, eroding interest payments to the Federal Reserve and loosening their control over the nation. Five months later John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas, and the United States Notes pulled from circulation and destroyed (except for samples held by collectors).

John J. McCloy, President of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and President of the World Bank, was named to the Warren Commission, presumably to make certain the banking dimensions behind the assassination were concealed from the public. The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins. Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis, covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren Commission perch and struck a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins. Kennedy's E.O. 11110 has never been repealed and is still in effect, although no modern President dares to use it.

Further all the issues regarding the middle East and the oil has had hands from Rockefellers and Rothschilds.

I'm too tired to write further more.
Sources: Various books and informations collected for months. Please excuse if somethings are wrong.

[NRao]

[Amber G.]

Qatar authorities have today handed over to our Embassy in Doha Sri Guru Granth Sahib (two Saroops) taken from an Indian national in a case related to running a religious establishment without approvals. We thank the Government of Qatar for the same

: MEA

[ricky_v]

https://time.com/7015330/ai-chips-us-ch ... -research/



https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8yp7z
link to the paper

A new peer-reviewed paper, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication, aims to fill that gap. “We set out to find: Where is AI?” says Vili Lehdonvirta, the lead author of the paper and a professor at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. Their findings were stark: GPUs are highly concentrated in only 30 countries in the world, with the U.S. and China far out ahead. Much of the world lies in what the authors call “Compute Deserts:” areas where there are no GPUs for hire at all.

The paper’s authors argue that the world can be divided into three categories: “Compute North,” where the most advanced chips are located; the “Compute South,” which has some older chips suited for running, but not training, AI systems; and “Compute Deserts,” where no chips are available for hire at all. The terms—which overlap to an extent with the fuzzy “Global North” and “Global South” concepts used by some development economists—are just an analogy intended to draw attention to the “global divisions” in AI compute, Lehdonvirta says.

The risk of chips being so concentrated in rich economies, says Wu, is that countries in the global south may become reliant on AIs developed in the global north without having a say in how they work.

However, beyond ideas of geopolitical great power ri
valry, our findings also suggest additional conceptual cate
gories relevant to discussing compute-based AI governance.
There are 15 other countries besides the U.S and China that
also host at least some quantity of the GPUs most relevant
to AI development, namely A100s and H100s. All of these
first-tier countries save for India are located in the so-called
Global North. To draw an analogy, we refer to them as the
“Compute North” (Figure 2). These Compute North coun
tries are positioned to use their territorial jurisdiction to in
tervene in AI development at the point at which models are
sent to their local public cloud regions for training. For in
stance, they could require algorithms and data sets to be au
dited and certified for compliance with their local rules be
fore training is permitted to commence, shaping what kinds
of AI systems can enter the global market.
A second tier of 13 countries hosts compute of a type
more suited for AI system deployment than for develop
ment. All of these countries are situated in the Global South,
save for Switzerland; we refer to them as the “Compute
South”. For instance, Latin America hosts a total five GPU
enabled cloud regions, but none of them featured more pow
erful GPUs than the 2017 V100. These countries are posi
tioned to use their territorial jurisdiction over compute to
gatekeep which AI systems can be deployed locally, but less
so for shaping AI system development.
Besides the “Compute North” and the “Compute South”,
there is also a “Compute Desert”, by which we refer to all
of the remaining countries in the world. These countries host
no public cloud AI compute at all, whether for training or
for deployment. For them, shifting to cloud-based AI-pow
ered services means relying on services both developed and
deployed on infrastructures located in foreign jurisdictions.
The Compute Desert contains a number of rich countries,
but it also contains all of the world’s lower middle-income
and lower-income countries, following the International
Monetary Fund’s (IMF) classification (IMF 2024). The im
plications of belonging to the Compute Desert are likely to
differ between rich and poor countries. The rich countries in
the Desert may be able to use their other advantages—such
as diplomatic influence over Compute North countries, and
wealth sufficient to build government-owned compute ca
pacity—to offset their lack of locally hosted public cloud AI
compute (Png 2022; Ferrari 2024). In contrast, the poorer
countries in the Compute Desert have few prospects for
making use of compute governance as a means to influence
AI.

[sanman]

Iraq has its own idea for an economic corridor which it's pursuing:

[Pratyush]

I am happy to see that India is classified as compute north.

[sanman]

I am happy to see that India is classified as compute north.

What is that red spot in the middle of Europe? Is that Switzerland?
Why would the Swiss be seen as computing-deficient? I thought that's a country that moved from making precision watches to making precision atomic clocks.

[sanman]

[ricky_v]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... no-hegemon

Asia Has No Hegemon
But U.S.-Chinese Bipolarity Is Good for America and the Region

Debates about the balance of power in Asia typically rely on one of three views. Some analysts believe, fatalistically, that China has become an unassailably dominant force in the region. Others place continued faith in U.S. primacy and see China as weak, vulnerable, and ultimately containable. Still others, including U.S. allies such as Australia and Japan, tout the emergence of a multipolar Indo-Pacific that could arrest China’s ambitions for regional hegemony.

To construct a more comprehensive and accurate view of the distribution of power in Asia, the Lowy Institute created the Asia Power Index, which goes beyond the traditional shorthand measure of economic size to look at military capability, national resilience, and the expected future distribution of demographic and economic resources, as well as four dimensions of regional influence: economic relationships, cultural influence, defense networks and diplomacy. What it reveals is a durable duopoly: the United States has lost primacy in Asia but remains around ten percent more powerful there than China. Scholars have posited that a power transition is triggered when a rising power’s overall strength approaches 80 percent of that of the established power. By 2018, China had already convincingly breached this threshold. But the dynamic is not that of a rising power eclipsing an established one; it is a dynamic of two powers that will likely continue to coexist as peer competitors applying different means of influence: the United States mainly uses security partnerships; China mainly uses economic relationships.

In Europe, by contrast, a cohesive multipolarity prevents any single country from posing a hegemonic threat. Russia may hope that the United States’ support for Ukraine will falter, but it does not have the resources to launch a direct conflict with a much larger bloc of EU and NATO countries aligned against it. The Middle East, meanwhile, is defined by messy multipolarity. A handful of players—China, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—are jostling for advantage as the United States continues to retreat from the region, but no regional power reigns supreme.

Bipolarity stabilizes Asia for the moment and enables the United States to protect its vital regional interests, preventing a potential hegemon from disrupting the peace, and safeguarding the economic benefits that Washington derives from trade and investment with the region. But to ensure that this suitable status quo prevails, the United States must contend with the strengths and limitations of its power, rather than overestimate the advantages of its regional alliance partnerships, and strengthen its appeal to nonaligned countries, which are still the majority in Asia.

Asia’s bipolarity has endured even as many have hoped that India and Japan could become pillars in a truly multipolar region. But according to the index, each of those countries has less than a third of China’s economic capability, a measure that accounts for the size of their economies, as well as their technological sophistication.

India and China have the two largest militaries in the world by number of personnel. Yet India’s ability to project power and influence east of the Strait of Malacca is limited. Neither its military nor Japan’s comes close to matching the capability of China’s People’s Liberation Army or the pace of its recent naval buildup. New Delhi and Tokyo can compete with Beijing in terms of cultural and diplomatic influence in Asia. But when it comes to economic relationships—trade, investment, and development financing—Japan has just 40 percent of China’s regional influence, down from 60 percent in 2018, and India a mere 15 percent.

Over the last decade, governments around the world have embraced the idea that Asia should really be understood as a two-ocean super-region, “the Indo-Pacific,” conjuring hopes that India as well as Australia and Japan could play decisive roles in preventing China from establishing a post-American order. But no major powers in the region are able to match China in the absence of the United States as a security guarantor. Without the United States as a balancing force, East Asia would be utterly dominated by China.

The surprising weakness of U.S. partners is disconcerting for Washington. It undermines the narrative that the United States is upgrading the alliance network it built in the Pacific after World War II—a multipolar makeover that the Biden administration has stressed as its primary achievement in Asia. As U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it in 2021, a new “latticework of alliances and partnerships” is enabling U.S. regional allies—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand—and other partners such as India to contribute more to the region’s security and to push back against China.

It is true that, with the exception of Thailand, Washington’s Asian allies are more closely aligned with the United States than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. But this must be assessed in the context of deepening bipolarity—a system in which only the United States has the power to challenge China.

Yet both Beijing and Washington overestimate the real changes to the United States’ alliance network in Asia. The comparatively small footprint of its alliances—comprising just five countries—has not grown in decades. Upgrading alliances alone cannot deliver a decisive additional advantage to the United States in its competition with China. In the event of a conflict or military contingency with China, U.S. allies would come under heavy pressure from Beijing to limit the United States’ access, basing, and overflight rights.

The United States no longer enjoys primacy in Asia. But an effort to restore this primacy would be seen by many Asian countries as disastrously revisionist. Instead, the United States should develop a strategy that focuses on shoring up its own position as a status quo power, one of two poles in Asia. This means doing more to reestablish its military edge in Asia by prioritizing the deployment of submarines, fighter aircraft, and warships to the region. Washington should continue to invest in alliances as part of a strategy to deter China but avoid overestimating the importance of these alliances to the overall balance of power in Asia. And to redress the shift away from the United States by the region’s nonaligned countries, it should engage more with them diplomatically and economically. Doing so will not restore U.S. primacy but can help ensure that bipolarity—the least bad option for America and the region—endures.

now, the us in asia has always been a behind-the-veil operator, giving a fig leaf cover to the supposed independence of thoughts and speech to the asean countries, but if it has tired of this arrangement and wants to be one of the 2 poles in the region, without any actual geographic presence, then the points to be undertaken by the us as suggested by the authors above is:

1) gain geographical presence in asia that is not some far-off island in the middle of nowhere, why not an island closer to important chokepoints from nations consisting of inbred, corrupt and 0 vision peoples.. can be many in asia

2) fatten the gullible and self-preening peacocks with words and weapons, highlight how they are the legions of the freedom and democracy forces in regions with blighted autocracies and move it against the bigger enemy.. again, many such examples

question is, in this bipolar asia, where one pole has geographic presence, and the other only visible phallic presence inside other countries that do have geographic presence, where do the vaunted vanguards of the quad lie?

[sanman]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... no-hegemon

Asia Has No Hegemon
But U.S.-Chinese Bipolarity Is Good for America and the Region
...

The United States no longer enjoys primacy in Asia. But an effort to restore this primacy would be seen by many Asian countries as disastrously revisionist. Instead, the United States should develop a strategy that focuses on shoring up its own position as a status quo power, one of two poles in Asia. This means doing more to reestablish its military edge in Asia by prioritizing the deployment of submarines, fighter aircraft, and warships to the region. Washington should continue to invest in alliances as part of a strategy to deter China but avoid overestimating the importance of these alliances to the overall balance of power in Asia. And to redress the shift away from the United States by the region’s nonaligned countries, it should engage more with them diplomatically and economically. Doing so will not restore U.S. primacy but can help ensure that bipolarity—the least bad option for America and the region—endures.

now, the us in asia has always been a behind-the-veil operator, giving a fig leaf cover to the supposed independence of thoughts and speech to the asean countries, but if it has tired of this arrangement and wants to be one of the 2 poles in the region, without any actual geographic presence, then the points to be undertaken by the us as suggested by the authors above is:

1) gain geographical presence in asia that is not some far-off island in the middle of nowhere, why not an island closer to important chokepoints from nations consisting of inbred, corrupt and 0 vision peoples.. can be many in asia

2) fatten the gullible and self-preening peacocks with words and weapons, highlight how they are the legions of the freedom and democracy forces in regions with blighted autocracies and move it against the bigger enemy.. again, many such examples

question is, in this bipolar asia, where one pole has geographic presence, and the other only visible phallic presence inside other countries that do have geographic presence, where do the vaunted vanguards of the quad lie?

Sounds like more G2 crap.
Regarding Quad, it's not gone anywhere beyond economic talk and hasn't made progress in the military sphere.
That's why US has gone for AUKUS, and more recently SQUAD. I don't think either of those can really work.
AUKUS will take too long to ramp up, and Philippines hasn't added any heft to SQUAD.
After election interference and then Dhaka Colour Revolution, I don't see how anything further can happen with Quad.

[ricky_v]

Sounds like more G2 crap.
Regarding Quad, it's not gone anywhere beyond economic talk and hasn't made progress in the military sphere.
That's why US has gone for AUKUS, and more recently SQUAD. I don't think either of those can really work.
AUKUS will take too long to ramp up, and Philippines hasn't added any heft to SQUAD.
After election interference and then Dhaka Colour Revolution, I don't see how anything further can happen with Quad.

no, quad has usefulness as a chai-biskoot plenary, and as sj has stated often, the quad is not only an armed forces union choir, but is rather a multi-pronged approach at handling the affairs and ills that plague asean in general, hence the focus on vaccines, comms and technology becoming one of the more core tenets of the quad

phillipines though is being primed to be sacrificed, other countries have not been stupid enough for this role, the lofty tenets of freedom and democracy have a readier home in the gardens of europe than in the jungles of asia, to the sad knowledge of the us and friends and a lesson-in-waiting for newfound "allies"

[sanman]

no, quad has usefulness as a chai-biskoot plenary, and as sj has stated often, the quad is not only an armed forces union choir, but is rather a multi-pronged approach at handling the affairs and ills that plague asean in general, hence the focus on vaccines, comms and technology becoming one of the more core tenets of the quad

phillipines though is being primed to be sacrificed, other countries have not been stupid enough for this role, the lofty tenets of freedom and democracy have a readier home in the gardens of europe than in the jungles of asia, to the sad knowledge of the us and friends and a lesson-in-waiting for newfound "allies"

I'd been seeing news reports of Japan holding exercises with Philippines and new laws & agreements to facilitate Japan help to Philippines.

Btw - how will Japan be reacting to any new G2 talk from Washington?
I can't see how they'd like that. Not that Washington really cares much for their opinion, anyway.

[bala]

Just to throw another spanner into the works of G2, QUAD, etc, now BRICS is toying with a NATO like plan for those in BRICS umbrella. That would let the pigeons out the door if such an agreement gets signed. The US will be staring at isolation of its strategy in world affairs.

[sanman]

CRIK: the China-Russia-Iran-NorthKorea Axis

[sanman]

Just to throw another spanner into the works of G2, QUAD, etc, now BRICS is toying with a NATO like plan for those in BRICS umbrella. That would let the pigeons out the door if such an agreement gets signed. The US will be staring at isolation of its strategy in world affairs.

I also keep reading about the new American strategy called "China+1"

They want to put sanctions on the Chinese, and feel they need at least one other supply alternative to China for any given market.
They'd prefer various potential alternatives, so that they don't have to get overly dependent on any one alternative (like India)

[drnayar]

Just to throw another spanner into the works of G2, QUAD, etc, now BRICS is toying with a NATO like plan for those in BRICS umbrella. That would let the pigeons out the door if such an agreement gets signed. The US will be staring at isolation of its strategy in world affairs.

that will decisively shift global power to asia.. india and china in a military alliance ? ,, sun will set for the west literally

[bala]

Maj Gen Rajiv Narayanan I India US Tensions, India China Resolution I India's Big Game I Aadi



Bharat has always been the fulcrum of the global economy. Why Greeks, Arabs, Huns, Mongols, Mughals, Afghans, Britishers, French, Portuguese, Dutch all of them invaded Bharat? Reason behind that is Bharat possesses vast resources while the whole world is full of deserts whether it is sandy, icy, salty, highland and marshy deserts. Now, the powers of the world are desperately trying to set fires in the neighboring small nations around India. गहरा राज्य Gehra Rajya is torn between US, China and India, they have deep fangs in the US/Eurotard nations, some in China and some marginal but potent opposition players in India. गहरा राज्य Gehra Rajya is playing with 100s of T (much of it looted from Bharat and around the world) as marbles in the game of global dominance. The mighty dollar is being replaced by the BRICS and others, there will be alternates to SWIFT and India's UPI is already attractive to the global south. If the BRICS NATO organization fructifies then US/NATO loose their relevance in the world. In fact entire UN will be a question mark.

Bharat is in a स्थितप्रज्ञ sthitapragyna state and needs to navigate through this muddle by using its स्थितप्रज्ञस्य का भाषा स्थितधी: in a sane manner.

[sanman]

Limits of Military Power in International System

[ricky_v]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/brazil/big-techs-coup

this is what i was talking about in the eu thread, thinking and reasoning like this needs to become more widespread in the west, and may this writer's tribe increase... the issue is that specialisation and diversification in all branches of studies has left very few people as a jack of all trades, and western politicians are most decidedly not these jacks, honestly, would recommending reading the entire article and deciding on the question: impotence or accountability?

On August 30, the Brazilian Supreme Court banned X—the social media platform formally known as Twitter—from its country’s Internet. The ban was the culmination of a months-long fight between Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the world’s richest man, and Alexandre de Moraes, one of the court’s justices. Moraes was tasked with investigating the role of online disinformation in attempts to keep former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in power, despite losing the election. As part of these duties, Moraes had ordered X to take down hundreds of accounts spreading disinformation. In response, the platform accused the justice of censorship. Musk withdrew the representatives X legally needed to operate in Brazil, which eventually led the justice to prevent Brazilians from accessing the platform altogether.

Musk did not take kindly to the decision, comparing Moraes to an “evil tyrant.” But Musk did not confine his anger to harsh denunciations. According to reporting by The New York Times, he actively worked around the order. First, Musk encouraged Brazilians to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to evade the blockage. Then, his Starlink satellite network, which provides Internet service to subscribers directly from space, continued providing access to the site. Finally, X rerouted its Internet traffic through new servers, allowing it to circumvent Brazil’s telecommunication controls altogether.

Under mounting pressure from authorities in a country with a significant number of X users (and asset seizures), the company eventually agreed to block the disinformation accounts and pay off its fines. But the brazenness with which a tech mogul was able to defy a state’s decision makes a stark and scary fact very tangible: democratic governments have lost their primacy in the digital world. Instead, companies and their executives are increasingly in charge. This power shift is the sum of society’s systemic dependence on technology firms, the legal gray zones in which they operate, and the unique characteristics of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. It is a product of how public institutions have been stripped of their technological knowledge, agency, and accountability. It is a reality that generations of politicians of various parties have allowed to set in.

If democracy is to survive, leaders must fight this coup head on. They need to shrink their overdependence on powerful tech companies. They must empower public interest technology as a counterweight. They need to rebuild their own tech expertise. Most of all, they must build effective and innovative regulatory regimes that can meaningfully hold tech companies (and governments using tech) to account. Doing so is needed to sustain open, free, and vibrant digital societies based on the rule of law.

The Brazilian case is a reminder that it is not too late. Democratic authorities can reclaim their sovereignty and assert themselves effectively in tech—if they choose to use their muscles.

n the years since, tech companies have progressed from developing products to operating entire systems that affect domains previously exclusively governed by states, such as digital infrastructure and its security guarantees. By unleashing their powerful tools and services into a world without proper guardrails, tech companies have become the de facto governors for technologies of great geopolitical significance, including facial recognition systems, satellite Internet connections, and some facets of intelligence collection. Microsoft has a Threat Intelligence Center that gathers insights as if it were the National Security Agency. Cryptocurrency companies mint their own money like the Federal Reserve. Amazon’s clean energy portfolio surpasses that of some countries, even as it builds power-hungry data centers.

In a one hearing, John Kennedy, a Republican senator, even asked the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, whether he might run a possible U.S. AI regulatory agency. Politicians have abdicated their responsibility to unelected, unaccountable technology leaders.

As a result, tech firms large and small now exercise unprecedented power over even the most critical infrastructure. For example, they dominate undersea data cables, which serve as the transportation system for almost all the world’s Internet traffic. Nearly 99 percent of the world’s data travels through them, including $10 trillion in daily financial transactions and highly sensitive government information. Without the cables, all kinds of essential activity would become impossible. They should therefore be governed and secured by states or intergovernmental bodies. But instead, companies build, use, and maintain them as policymakers stand on the sidelines.

Tech companies are also deeply involved in state bureaucracies, making governments vulnerable in mundane but serious ways. In 2013, for example, Dutch tax authorities deployed controversial, privately built algorithmic risk assessments to identify fraudulent taxpayers. It was a disaster: because of faulty assessments, including through racial profiling, tens of thousands of families lost their homes, jobs, and custody over their children as the opaque, self-learning risk assessment tool was rigorous and discriminatory. The political fallout ultimately drove the government to resign and permanently damaged people’s trust in the state. But the company that deployed the faulty software has emerged relatively unscathed. Similar algorithms remain in use and on the market around the world, with the potential to wreak even more havoc.

In other instances, tech firms have effectively become direct parties to conflicts. Confrontations increasingly take place in cyberspace, and so states increasingly depend on private companies for defense. Consider what happened when Colonial Pipeline’s networks were struck by a ransomware attack in 2021. The company is one of the biggest energy providers in the United States, and so the strike halted the flow of oil across much of the U.S. East Coast. Several U.S. states declared states of emergency as lines formed at gas stations. Flights had to be rerouted. At a meeting with tech CEOs in the aftermath of the attack, U.S. President Joe Biden conceded that “the reality is most of our critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector.” He continued: “The federal government can’t meet this challenge alone.” It was a rare, open admission that the governmental had lost power when it comes to protecting the country in the digital realm.

Despite the growing use of destructive cyberattacks, the White House considers such attacks to be below the threshold of war. There are also no clear-cut international rules about what cyberattacks are prohibited. Espionage through digital means is typically not considered a violation of state sovereignty, so it is left unpunished. In 2022, Paul Nakasone, then the head of U.S. Cyber Command, said that the United States used offensive cyber capabilities to take out Russian targets but did not consider such attacks a direct engagement of Russia. Washington did, however, draw a redline at NATO’s borders for physically fighting Moscow’s forces.

Too often, states operate at an information disadvantage when it comes to technology. With few exceptions, they lack the access to information as well as expertise required to understand (let alone regulate) new algorithms and inventions. Because knowledge is power, this dearth leaves policymakers in a weak negotiating position vis-à-vis powerful tech companies, which leads to even more outsourcing. Companies such as Palantir Technologies are now trusted to perform critical data analyses when it comes to matters of defense, health care, and border control. They are doing so even though they lack the democratic authority, accountability, and experience needed to make these calls. “Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting,” Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, said in an interview with The New York Times in the summer of 2024—as if life-and-death decisions were a computer game.

Tech firms are also consolidating power through their pocketbooks. The biggest tech companies are exceptionally wealthy: Microsoft’s market cap stands at $3.2 trillion, more than the GDP of France, the seventh-largest economy in the world. As a result, these firms have no problem spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying. And the lobbyists often find they are pushing on open doors. Because politicians and other officials have so little tech expertise, corporate representatives can easily mold their thinking. Tech companies have similarly used their money to frame the world’s collective understanding of their industry by investing in think tanks, conferences, and academic institutions.

One of the frames tech businesses have been most successful in promoting is that, as Facebook put it when trying to dissuade European regulators from implementing the EU’s data protection directive in 2012, “regulation stifles innovation.” This argument is as wrong as it is self-serving, especially as big tech companies become gatekeepers and make life for innovative start-ups difficult. Yet the phrase remains popular through today. Regulation is dynamic, not fixed, adjusting as industries do. In many cases, responsible guardrails have actually sparked innovation. Companies, for instance, invented more environmentally friendly or sustainable products after stricter environmental protection laws came into force. And even if regulation did slow innovation, the tradeoff may well be worth it. Philosophically, innovation is not more important than the rule of law, consumer protection, nondiscrimination, or any of the other values central to democracy. If an innovation has the potential to curtail fundamental rights or contradict public values, regulation has every right to supersede it. Politicians should recognize this fact and act accordingly.

But even if they do, they will run into more barriers. Tech companies have gained more power by refusing to explain how their products function. As a result, academics cannot independently research the inner workings of algorithms or AI applications. Tech firms engage in outright deception, too. When Microsoft sought political approval for a data center in Iowa in 2016, it did so under the pseudonym “Project Osmium.” Bidding behind shell companies has become the norm among tech companies. Uber took this practice of obfuscation further with Greyball. In that project, according to reporting by The New York Times, Uber identified law enforcement officers in jurisdictions where the company was not yet authorized to operate. It then made it so that, when they opened the app, they would struggle to determine whether Uber was, in fact, available in their areas. In this way, the company was able to work while evading detection. Outside of sporadic fines, governments have not done enough to rein in these practices, demand transparency, and hold companies accountable.

Regulators are further hampered by the raw pace at which tech advances. Companies have avoided the law in part by inventing technologies so quickly that they stay ahead of it. They can then engage in questionable behavior without having to worry about policy blowback. Clearview AI, for example, scraped the entire Internet for faces before anyone noticed. Large language models were trained on the text body of the entire Internet before governments could weigh in on questions about data protection or intellectual property rights, assuming laws protecting those rights are in force. As companies hoover up masses of information only to lock it behind corporate walls, public institutions lose access to information, and thus agency and credibility. The result is a death spiral, where private power eventually exceeds the capacity of public accountability.


Activists and journalists have repeatedly set off alarms about the industry, but consecutive U.S. administrations have been deliberately lax when it comes to the sector, hoping to laissez-faire their way through any and all concerns. The EU has been more proactive, but very few of its laws are aimed at ending the power grab. Democracies need a clear vision of how to comprehensively govern tech.

Governments could start by adjusting trade secrecy protections for the age of algorithms. They should require that researchers have access to data and that tech systems used in the name of governments are accessible, for example, through Freedom of Information Act requests. Doing so would allow the public to learn how these systems operate, facilitating a well-informed regulatory debate. In a similar vein, companies should be held to stronger transparency standards when it comes to bidding on land and energy contracts for data centers or disclosing their investors. If a company is unwilling to say who funds them, they are unfit to do business in the open market.

To take advantage of this newfound transparency, lawmakers would also have to build up internal technology expertise. Such experts would balance out the cacophony of lobbyists trying to frame how lawmakers understand technology. The United States, for example, might bring back the Office of Technology Assessment, a congressional body that helped legislators understand new telecommunications and computing innovations and operated in full from 1974 to 1995. Policymakers need an OTA, or an OTA equivalent, in order to navigate an era that includes artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology.


Regulations are just one part of the path forward. States should also invest significantly in creating public digital infrastructure, stronger academic research, and a better digital public square. Additionally, societies need to build a culture of tech ethics and accountability that compels companies to make the right decisions.

Any time the Musks of the world refuse to listen to judges and regulators, it is a good reminder of the fact that states have the ability to rein in big tech and prioritize democratic governance, if only they wanted to. It is not too late to stop the tech coup. But governments need to enact real, systemic reforms to win their power back and enshrine the rule of law.

[chetak]

First time since 2019, Erdogan skips mention of Kashmir in UN speech

https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... h-9590297/



this opportunistic and jihadi bigot now needs India's help to get into the BRICS and he is very much afraid that India will block him

[sanman]

First time since 2019, Erdogan skips mention of Kashmir in UN speech

https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... h-9590297/

this opportunistic and jihadi bigot now needs India's help to get into the BRICS and he is very much afraid that India will block him

We need to strike a deal with him to get our of the Kashmir business, if he wants our support for BRICS entry.

Other than his meddling on Kashmir and his support to Pak, we'd have no quarrel with him.

Turkey joining BRICS would cause Unkil major heartburn, since NATO can't fight any war against Russia without Turkey.

But other than that, Turkey with its floundering inflation-hit economy offers no economic benefit for BRICS.

I would really want them to only be a non-veto-wielding member.
I feel like founding members (Brazil-Russia-India-China-SouthAfrica) should have veto power, while the rest shouldn't.

[chetak]

https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... h-9590297/

this opportunistic and jihadi bigot now needs India's help to get into the BRICS and he is very much afraid that India will block him

We need to strike a deal with him to get our of the Kashmir business, if he wants our support for BRICS entry.

Other than his meddling on Kashmir and his support to Pak, we'd have no quarrel with him.

Turkey joining BRICS would cause Unkil major heartburn, since NATO can't fight any war against Russia without Turkey.

But other than that, Turkey with its floundering inflation-hit economy offers no economic benefit for BRICS.

I would really want them to only be a non-veto-wielding member.
I feel like founding members (Brazil-Russia-India-China-SouthAfrica) should have veto power, while the rest shouldn't.

sanman ji,

just keep these venomous buggers out of BRICS and be done with it. how many hundreds of times should India fall for taqiya derived subterfuges


shed that silly image of ghandy that has hobbled us on the global stage for close to eight decades, a narrative which was always an albatross around India's neck. It's okay to sometimes trot out the bandicoot for some polite drawing room conversations, but it is not meant to be used for the harsh realities of realpolitik and geopolitics


troublemakers need to be kicked hard in the testimonials, no deals, just do it and always play to your strengths.


The world respects the practicality of political potency that is demonstrated, by always keeping one's self interests in mind and the reform of jihadis is impossible, as every kindergarten kid in India knows


nothing can be gained from these turkis, now or anytime in the future. It has always been a civilizational issue with them


turkis fantasize that they are the torchbearers of an imagined resurgent ottoman empire, but in their hearts, they truly know that they are actually only the pallbearers

[sanman]

sanman ji,

just keep these venomous buggers out of BRICS and be done with it. how many hundreds of times should India fall for taqiya derived subterfuges


shed that silly image of ghandy that has hobbled us on the global stage for close to eight decades, a narrative which was always an albatross around India's neck. It's okay to sometimes trot out the bandicoot for some polite drawing room conversations, but it is not meant to be used for the harsh realities of realpolitik and geopolitics


troublemakers need to be kicked hard in the testimonials, no deals, just do it and always play to your strengths.


The world respects the practicality of political potency that is demonstrated, by always keeping one's self interests in mind and the reform of jihadis is impossible, as every kindergarten kid in India knows


nothing can be gained from these turkis, now or anytime in the future. It has always been a civilizational issue with them


turkis fantasize that they are the torchbearers of an imagined resurgent ottoman empire, but in their hearts, they truly know that they are actually only the pallbearers

Fair enough - keep them out then - and one good way to help do that is to set rules for BRICS that members don't comment on the internal matters of other BRICS members, especially not relating to territorial integrity.

[S_Madhukar]

Turki are Paki lite. If you shift that country to S Asia they will be as rabid never mind their Euro features! Smart Turki run away to West the local kebab walla is left. One of them complained to me we get so many Indian tourist but problem is they don’t eat meat then some others were trying to impress Sino girls that they are all central Asian communities Meanwhile they happily host Russians en masse in their country as residents and tourists while we are actually doing a job refining and selling oil. Just like our moms kept some of our uncles and aunties away for a reason best is to keep them an arms length away

[sanman]

[sanman]

[sanman]

By putting so many sanctions on so many others over so many things, the US is succeeding at sanctions on itself

[sanman]