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AI, Gold and Nuclear War

April 17, 2024

AI, Gold and Nuclear War

So-called artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm. Meanwhile, gold has shot up like a rocket over the past couple of months.

In mid-February, gold was trading at $1,990. Two months later, gold is trading above $2,400 — a $410 gain in just two months.

So here’s a question:

Is there a connection between AI and gold? It seems like an odd question. But as it turns out, the answer is yes. And surprisingly, there has been for decades. It involves the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, the KGB was deeply concerned about the possibility of a nuclear first strike by the United States. At the time, Yuri Andropov was head of the KGB.

Andropov’s fear of a nuclear first strike by the U.S. was based in part on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s plan to install Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Those missiles could be armed with nuclear warheads and could strike the Soviet Union within minutes of being launched. This put Soviet nuclear forces on a hair-trigger alert. They adopted a “launch on warning” posture.

This means that as soon as credible evidence of a planned first strike was discovered, the Soviet Union would launch its own first strike to avoid destruction of its forces.

The irony was that the U.S. had no actual plans to launch a first strike, but the Soviet Union didn’t know that. Reagan’s speeches about the “evil empire” did nothing to calm Soviet concerns.

AI and Nuclear Readiness

In response, the Soviets developed a primitive (by today’s standards) AI system called VRYAN. That’s a Russian acronym for: sudden nuclear missile attack.

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Saudi Prince Delivers a Message About the Second Cold War

August 28, 2022

SAUDI PRINCE DELIVERS A MESSAGE ABOUT THE SECOND COLD WAR

Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman (ABS) said this week that OPEC+ may need to cut oil production. This may be necessary, he said, to correct problems in the market because “the paper and physical markets have become increasingly more disconnected.”

This is rhetorical theater. It has no real basis is fact. But that’s not what this is really about.

This is about the second Cold War to create new world order.

In a written statement to Bloomberg, ABS stated,

The paper oil market has fallen into a self-perpetuating vicious circle of very thin liquidity and extreme volatility undermining the market’s essential function of efficient price discovery.
–Abdulaziz bin Salman

It is true that volatility has been extreme since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, 2022 but that was nearly six months ago. The worst of the volatility ended in April so the timing of ABS’s comments makes little sense based on oil-market technical concerns.

Liquidity and volatility are inversely related. When volatility is high, investors are reluctant to invest in futures contracts. That’s because the price variance is too high to make manage risk. With limited capital flowing in and out of oil markets, it is difficult to convert an asset/contract into cash. High volatility begets low liquidity.

ABS’s distinction between the futures (paper) and physical (spot) markets does not survive the light of day.

Figure 1 shows Brent futures price (red), futures price volatility (blue) and 2021 average price volatility (dashed blue). Both price and price volatility increased after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February of 2022. Volatility decreased in April but has not returned to the pre-invasion 2021 volatility average.

Figure 1. Brent oil-price volatility & futures price both increased with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. Source: CME, EIA & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

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The second Cold War is here — and supply chains will be the front lines

March 3, 2022

The second Cold War is here — and supply chains will be the front lines

Entire supply chains will be rewritten, creating massive volatility and unpredictability

We are witnessing the remaking of the world order in front of our eyes — and this will impact global supply chains in unforeseen ways.

We are about to experience the most dramatic and unpredictable supply chain map we’ve experienced since World War II.

If the Russia-Ukraine conflict’s international ramifications keep spreading, we face a real possibility of a bifurcating global economy, in which geopolitical alliances, energy and food flows, currency systems, and trade lanes could split.

During the first Cold War, the world was anything but flat. There were two worlds — the East and the West. That world is being recreated as we speak, and with it, Western companies will start to shift sourcing away from the East and more toward Western and neutral states. North American economic integration will become a new priority. Surface transportation across the Eurasian continent will become more complex, and possibly contested.

Entire supply chains will be rewritten, with new sources and partners — all in the interest of corporate and national security. This will create massive volatility and unpredictability.

Companies will prioritize vendors that can provide consistent and dependable supplies, likely paying a premium. In the end, those costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

While prices will become an important consideration for consumers, brands that offer a consistently and predictably available set of choices will enjoy pricing power.

The future market winners will be the corporations that make the investments in supply chain infrastructure and reliable, Western-friendly production locations.

Supply chain analyst roles will become the hottest jobs of the next decade, prized by corporations, consulting and even Wall Street for the ability to interpret, analyze and predict disruptions and risks in a new world order…

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Truth Is The First Casualty In Cold War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

October 5, 2020

Truth Is The First Casualty In Cold War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Governments make evidence-free claims which the mass media report uncritically, with ordinary citizens expected to either prove them wrong or shut up and believe. The burden of proof is fallaciously placed on members of the public and tiny indie media outlets with no resources to disprove the claims, instead of on massive news media outlets with abundant wealth and resources. It should be the exact opposite: with unproven government claims ignored until hard proof is provided, and with mass media reporters doing their goddamn jobs.

No institutional changes were made to ensure that the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn’t be repeated. It’s one of those big, glaring problems people just decided to pretend is resolved, like racism.

Whenever someone says “I oppose Assange’s extradition, but,” everything before the “but” is a lie, and it’s a safe bet that everything after it will be too.

Truth is the first casualty in war. This adage is especially true of cold war, where the absence of hot firepower makes an emphasis on mass-scale psychological operations necessary.

People who tell you that now is not the time for truthful criticisms of Joe Biden are telling you they only like the truth when it’s politically convenient. Do you know what people who only like the truth when it’s politically convenient are called? They’re called liars.

The main thing that will change if Biden wins the election is that when the president does something evil Democrats will shift from saying “I hope you Jill Stein voters are happy” to saying nothing at all.

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Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War.

September 20, 2020

Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War.

Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian relations, has died of lung cancer at the age of 81.

As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet, this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen’s expert analysis many times in my own work, and his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what’s really going on with the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions against Moscow.

In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen’s death is a blow to humanity’s desperate quest for clarity and understanding.

I don’t know how long Cohen had cancer. I don’t know how long he was aware that he might not have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war, which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.

The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019’s War with Russia?, detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016 cold war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.

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“It’s A New Cold War” – China Shutters American Consulate In Retaliation For Houston Mission Closure

July 24, 2020

“It’s A New Cold War” – China Shutters American Consulate In Retaliation For Houston Mission Closure

As one prominent CCP mouthpiece warned yesterday afternoon, China has unveiled its retaliation against Washington for ordering the abrupt closure of a consulate in Houston. And markets aren’t taking it too well, with US futures moving even lower following a sharp selloff Thursday afternoon as the gravity of the situation finally rattled investor confidence.

China announced Friday morning that it would order the closure of the American consulate in Chengdu, a major Chinese city and the capital of Sichuan Province.

China ordered the US to close Chengdu consulate within 72 hours, the same as the time that the US gave to China for the closure of the Houston consulate, according to Global Times editor Hu Xijin.

As the New York Times explains, this latest tit-for-tat suggests that the bilateral relationship between the world’s two largest economies has reached another grim milestone as the deterioration accelerates.

The tit-for-tat consulate closures were yet another twist in deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing, perhaps the gravest one yet. Previous moves by the two sides have included visa restrictions, new travel rules for diplomats and the expulsion of foreign correspondents. By shutting down diplomatic missions, however, the two countries seem to be moving inexorably toward a deeper divide.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing said the move was a “legitimate and necessary response to the unjustified act by the United States.” It said the United States was responsible for the deterioration in relations and urged it to “immediately retract” its directive to close the consulate in Houston.
China’s announcement came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech outlining the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive stance toward China on virtually every aspect of the relationship — from trade to technology.

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The UK and US are Starting a New Cold War with Russia and China, So What are These Governments Trying to Hide?

July 20, 2020

The UK and US are Starting a New Cold War with Russia and China, So What are These Governments Trying to Hide?

Photograph Source: Jonathan Stonehouse – CC BY 2.0

The new Cold War launched by the West against China and Russia is escalating by the day. In a single week, the Kremlin has been unmasked trying to discover the secrets of Britain’s pursuit of a vaccine against coronavirus and revelations are promised about covert Russian interference in British politics. Boris Johnson made a U-turn on Huawei, announcing that it is to be kicked out of participation in the 5G network because it poses a threat to British security, though a curiously slow-burning one since they will only be evicted over seven years.

The US may put the widely-used Chinese video app TikTok on a blacklist that would prevent Americans from using it. The administration is considering using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to penalise TikTok as “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US security. President Trump says he is considering banning the app in response to the way China handled the coronavirus epidemic.

This is a clue to the prime motive for Trump to ramp up the Cold War against China, which is his determination to win a second term in the White House by diverting voters’ attention from his catastrophic handling of the pandemic. “Don’t defend Trump – attack China,” is the advice of a leaked 57-page memo circulated among Republican Senatorial candidates in April. It suggested that Republican politicians should blame China for starting the epidemic by allowing the virus to escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, lying about it and hoarding medical equipment needed to treat the sick.

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Do You Consent To The New Cold War?

May 24, 2020

Do You Consent To The New Cold War?

The world’s worst Putin puppet is escalating tensions with Russia even further, with the Trump administration looking at withdrawal from more nuclear treaties in the near future.

In addition to planning on withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty and knocking back Moscow’s attempts to renew the soon-to-expire New START Treaty, Trump is also contemplating breaking the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban treaty by conducting the first US nuclear test explosion since 1992, reportedly as an attempt to bring China to the table for joining New START.

Moon of Alabama has already published a solid breakdown of all this, outlining the absence of evidence for the Trump administration’s justifications of its treaty withdrawals and explaining why China has nothing whatsoever to gain by signing on to a trilateral New START Treaty. I have nothing to add to this, other than to ask a simple question.Moon of Alabama@MoonofA

New on MoA:
U.S. Threatens New Nuclear Tests To Push China Into A Treaty It Does Not Wanthttps://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/05/us-threatens-new-nuclear-tests-to-push-against-russia-and-china.html …

141 2:02 PM – May 23, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 170 people are talking about this

The question I want to ask is, do you consent to this?

Do you consent to steadily mounting cold war escalations against not one but two nuclear-armed nations?

Do you consent to having a bunch of unseen military personnel rolling the dice every day on the gamble that we won’t wipe ourselves off the face of this earth in the confusion and chaos of rising hostilities due to miscommunication or technical malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war?

Do you consent to a slow-motion third world war where an oligarch-led alliance of powerful nations works tirelessly to absorb new nations into its imperial blob by any means necessary?

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Spirits in the Material World

February 27, 2020

SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

The Police – Spirits in the Material World

As I was driving home from work last week, an almost forty-year-old song began emanating from my radio. I’ve always appreciated the music of The Police, but was never a huge fan. Spirits in the Material World was a relatively minor hit from their 1981 Ghost in the Machine multi-platinum album. I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times over the last four decades, but the lyrics struck me as particularly apropos at the end of a week where lunatic left-wing politicians staged a battle royale of ineptitude, invective, and idiotic solutions, in front of a perplexed public in a Vegas casino. Sting wrote the lyrics to this song in 1981 at the outset of the Reagan presidency. It is less than 3 minutes in length, but says much about humanity and the world we inhabit.

The interpretation of Sting’s (Gordon Sumner) lyrics depends upon your position in the generational kaleidoscope of history. As a boomer, Sting came of age during the 1960s and 70s. He was thirty years old in 1981 as the Second Turning (Awakening) was winding down and Reagan’s Morning in America was about to launch the Third Turning (Unraveling) in 1984.

His passionate idealism and search for spiritual solutions to the problems of the day had not been extinguished. The raging inflation of the 1970s had led to the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Cold War was at its coldest. Politicians had been discredited as criminal (Nixon) or incompetent (Carter). Sting and many others of his generation had lost faith in the political system. His viewpoint fit perfectly into the Strauss and Howe assessment of our last Awakening period (1964 – 1984).

Image result for awakening strauss and howe

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How the U.S. Regime and Its Allies Enforce Their Smears and Their Other Lies

January 29, 2020

How the U.S. Regime and Its Allies Enforce Their Smears and Their Other Lies

Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Syria since 2012, and their coup against Ukraine in 2014, and also of their takeovers and attempted takeovers of other countries that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands — America’s subterranean continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991.

All of the lies are still being propounded by the U.S. regime and remain fully enforced by suppression of the truth about these matters. That’s being done in all news-media except a few of the non-mainstream ones.

So: this is about an actual Western samizdat — the West’s equivalent to the former Soviet Union’s systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not. (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be “good,” even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.)

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“New Cold War” Unleashing “Geopolitical Chaos”: China Reacts To US Offensive Missiles In Asia

August 5, 2019

“New Cold War” Unleashing “Geopolitical Chaos”: China Reacts To US Offensive Missiles In Asia

China’s Global Times — the communist country’s hawkish, belligerent state tabloid — has responded to the Pentagon’s Friday announcement stating the US is looking to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles to Asia “within months,” warning “it will certainly trigger an intense arms race in the region.”

Its editorial board, long understood as a mouthpiece of the state, has slammed remarks made by US Defense Secretary Mark Esper outlining the new mid-range ballistic missile deployment plans, crucially which came immediately on the heels of the formal collapse of the landmark US-Russia INF treaty, saying American greed and naked drive for hegemony will spark a dangerously unprecedented arms race which will fuel further “instability” across Asia. The Global Times commentary opens with:

The US is greedily pursuing an absolute and all-sided military superiority to consolidate its hegemony. It refuses to accept any relative balance of power. Such a stubborn and overbearing country has become the largest source of Asia’s instability.

The authors further warn US plans will “break the status quo” in Asia, unleashing “geopolitical chaos” by deploying offensive weapons, because “Any country accepting US deployment would be against China and Russia, directly or indirectly, and draw fire against itself.”

“Asian countries must collectively resist the US’ attempt in creating new crisis in this region and prevent it from provoking extreme arms races and forcing all countries to take sides,” the editorial urges further.

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What Does It Mean to Live in a Multipolar World? We May Be About to Find Out

May 31, 2019

What Does It Mean to Live in a Multipolar World? We May Be About to Find Out

The breakdown in the Sino-U.S. trade talks has led a number of commentatorsto suggest that America’s “unipolar moment” of post-Cold War preeminence is over, as Washington lashes out against a rising China, whose economic rise threatens America’s historic dominance. Direct military violence is highly unlikely, given the inherent fragility of high-tech civilization. We therefore may see Cold War–style conflict between the two superpowers, as relations in trade or national security matters become increasingly poisoned.

So what happens to the rest of us? Will a hitherto globalized world increasingly retreat into bifurcated competing blocs, much as occurred under the original Cold War? Or can the rest of the world develop a more muted and stable form of multilateralism?

After all, we are well past the point where parts of the globe are increasingly carved up via competing ideologies (e.g., capitalism vs. communism), given today’s broad embrace of various permutations of capitalism, or divided via proxy wars, or the “great game” of colonial expansion. Today, most nations focus on maximizing the relative productivity of their own respective economies, as opposed to establishing their ideological bona fides as quasi-colonial client states for either the United States or the former Soviet Union. Another important dimension to recognize is that what we understand to be global or international is, for the most part, owned and controlled by industrialized countries: 93 percent of foreign-owned production is controlled by Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD) economies. Even the historic tendency to focus on state power should be questioned in this moment. In 2016, 69 of the world’s largest 100 economies were corporations, with their own range of interests and methods of functioning.

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The Next Economic Crisis and the Looming Post-Multipolar System

May 24, 2019

The Next Economic Crisis and the Looming Post-Multipolar System

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called “globalization” which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many “emerging markets” created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand. However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating—and bursting—several financial “bubbles”. Even today’s US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial “black swan” event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal “firepower” on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply “more of the same.” It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy.

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The US’ War Against Iran & Venezuela’s “Deep States” Is Going Public

April 16, 2019

The US’ War Against Iran & Venezuela’s “Deep States” Is Going Public

The US’ desire to dismantle the network of Iranian influence in Latin America and specifically in Venezuela speaks to its commitment to counter the regional sway of its rivals’ “deep states”, though it’s hitherto unprecedented for any country to make such a crusade public since the end of the Old Cold War, let alone clothe it in “anti-terrorist” and “anti-criminal” rhetoric.

US Secretary of State Pompeo recently reiterated his rhetoric that Iran is a “global threat”, this time basing it on his claims that the country’s network of influence in Latin America is supporting “transnational crime” and “terrorism”. This comes shortly after Washington designated the IRGC as a “terrorist” organization and approximately half a year since the Justice Department began investigating Iranian ally Hezbollah’s alleged links to drug cartels as a follow-up to the scandalous Obama-era “Operation Cassandra“. Taken together, it’s clear that the US desires to dismantle Iran and Venezuela’s supposedly interconnected influence networks in Latin America as the next step in fortifying “Fortress America“, and while “deep state” wars such as this one have been going on for decades, it’s hitherto unprecedented for any country to make such a crusade public since the end of the Old Cold War when the US used to make similar claims about the USSR and its communist proxies.

Evidently, the US isn’t shy about ushering in a new era of “deep state” wars whereby Great Powers such as itself (which is presently the leading one in the world) openly work to thwart the networks of influence established by its regional rivals’ on the grounds that the military-intelligence wings of their “deep states” are engaged in “criminal” and “terrorist” activities that threaten the world at large.

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The Cold War Ides of March

March 23, 2019

The Cold War Ides of March

US Cold Warriors escalate toward actual war with Russia.

Russian Air Force Su-25 jets fly past the Russian flag on the Kremlin complex during a rehearsal for the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Friday, May 4, 2018. (AP Photo / Pavel Golovkin)

Heedless of the consequences, or perhaps welcoming them, America’s Cold Warriors and their media platforms have recently escalated their rhetoric against Russia, especially in March. Anyone who has lived through or studied the preceding 40-year Cold War will recognize the ominous echoes of its most dangerous periods, when actual war was on the horizon or a policy option. Here are only a few random but representative examples:

§ In a March 8 Washington Post opinion article, two American professors, neither with any apparent substantive knowledge of Russia or Cold War history, warned that the Kremlin is trying “to undermine our trust in the institutions that sustain a strong nation and a strong democracy. The media, science, academia and the electoral process are all regular targets.” Decades ago, J. Edgar Hoover, the policeman of that Cold War, said the same, indeed made it an operational doctrine.

§ Nor is the purported threat to America only. According to (retired) Gen. David Petraeus and sitting Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, also in the Post on the following day, the “world is once again polarized between two competing visions for how to organize society.” For Putin’s Kremlin, “the existence of the United States’ rule-of-law world is intrinsically threatening.” This is an “intensifying worldwide struggle.” So much for those who dismissed post–Soviet Russia as merely a “regional” power, including former President Barack Obama, and for the myopic notion that a new Cold War was not possible.

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