Trump plays reckless with the world's trust

 

President Trump invested much into the promotion of his image as a peace president. But his intellectual weakness and consequent susceptibility to 'expert' opinion, coupled with the fact of neocon dominance of US foreign policy and military mindset these last few decades, plus other factors no doubt, have all worked together to seduce Trump into an egregiously distorted view of US military power, and into acceptance of the erroneous "peace through strength" mantra. I believe this claim despite what follows in the next paragraph.

Israel's ongoing strike on Iran appears for the moment to have been very effective, intelligent, and well executed. On the evidence available so far – one part of which is Iranian silence – it looks to be a mighty blow, one Israel is well placed to capitalise on over coming days and weeks. Iran is already under pressure to successfully weather this onslaught.

And yet attacks of this character – surprise, pyrotechnic, awesome, comprehensive – often begin neocon/Israeli wars, or more accurately the military phase of neocon projects (Project Ukraine required a different approach; Russia is a peer rival). But for all their might, intelligence and detailed planning, what follows on their heels has yet to be a stabilisation of the region involved, let alone some manner of 'victory' that reshapes the world such that the US reigns more supremely as a consequence. Over the last four decades of neocon foreign-policy dominance, we have seen an unmistakable evaporation of both US hard and soft power, as well as a decline of its relative economic supremacy. Of course there is more to this story than neocon adventurism, but that in fact underscores the point I'm making. No person or group controls everything.

Even if Israel topples the current Iranian government, what happens next? The BRICS-based world can easily interpret current events as proof positive that the US is utterly untrustworthy. Perhaps tentative trust in Trump was used to deceive Iran and Russia into a false sense of the authenticity of US intentions to reach a deal on the Iranian nuclear-power and nuclear-enrichment programmes. Considering the West's casual disregard of Minsk I and Minsk II, considering its influence on Zelenskyy to walk away from the April/May 2022 peace talks with Russia in Istanbul, and other chicanery besides, all trust is gone. If Iran is toppled, I predict it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Fear holds things stable for a while, but only for a while.

As I've said before, when all you have is an army, everything looks like a war. The militaristic mindset that pervades the neocon perspective, which is in essence little more than "might makes right", is akin to an army, or an intellectual/psychological filtering process that may as well be an army. "Do as we say, or else" is the neocon way. President Trump's 'diplomacy' in the Truth Social post that heads this article oozes that mentality. So much so, the President comes across to me as a boy among (deranged) adults, a boy defenceless against their wiles and psychopathically resolute determination to have the world their way. But all of it is, in my view, in fact the way to ruin.

Roughly the first 50 days of the Trump presidency were hopeful, in my opinion. I believed they were sufficiently strongly anti-war to carry the day. I was wrong. We are now back to the reckless uncertainty of the Biden administration. Permanent-state inertia and ivory-tower arrogance have overcome what I suspect were sincere intentions on Trump's part to do things differently. But Trump's impatience with detail, his insecurities, his lack of intellectual courage, his over-reliance on the wildly unpredictable manner of his social-media 'diplomacy', have hamstrung those intentions, such as they were. It has been one embarrassing gaffe after another, and I am grossly understating the ugliness of what we have witnessed over the last couple of months.

I cannot see how the MAGA movement can continue to support Trump for much longer. I anticipate a split between the populist forces behind Trump on the one hand, and his presidency on the other, as his presidency sinks deeper and deeper under neocon waves. Furthermore, BRICS nations, and especially Russia and China, cannot tolerate a broken Iran. Therefore, the risks of a nuclear conflagration if Iran recovers sufficiently to weather the initial weeks of this strike, especially if Israel then comes to feel existentially threatened by Iran's recovery, are significantly above zero. 

One part of my broader analysis is the faint expectation that a powerfully cohering awakening among the US population – namely to realise that the US permanent-state and intelligence establishment does not have The People's best interests at heart, and that this conglomeration includes US media outlets for the most part, not to mention British and other Western European outlets – might be triggered by a great disillusionment with Trump the Myth, as previously stated in Econosophy pages. But much else would have to hold for this to actually happen. The riots in LA look to be but one part of a broad destabilisation effort aimed at dragging Trump's final term deep into the belly of the neocon beast. Other actions of this type might well be in the works. Coupled with continued degradation of the US economy as AI-rooted technological unemployment gathers pace over coming months and years, could well mean such an awakening of this type has little to no chance of gaining any meaningful momentum.

And yet these are interesting times, one way or the other. Life has about it an irrepressible power to surprise, to deliver the unexpected. This power is deeper than the sort of glittering intelligence that characterises neocon cunning; none of us can be sure what the future will bring. This is an epochal historical moment. Trump's role has proved not be peace maker; he lacks the strength of character and richness of wisdom to do that noble undertaking justice. But this does not mean war will destroy us all, or turn out as its adherents expect. There is many a slip twixt cup and lip, and reality always bats last.

Israel attacks Iran

 

As the militaristic and pathocratic elements currently holding sway over combined Western power launch yet another attempt at global domination, the great majority of humans on earth who want peace and harmony are understandably experiencing, yet again, a further increase in their fear. In this little posting, all I want to say is that at times like these, especially in moments of fear, it is helpful to take a moment to notice how life carries on undeterred.

The image above is of a weed growing at the entrance to my front garden. Its delicate little flowers with their richly yellow petals, opportunistically growing from between dusty cracks in the broken concrete of our path, remind me of God, of life's unquenchable resilience, and thus of beauty's irrepressible drive to express and re-express in every possible circumstance. 

In other words, always find your way back to love. Every one of us can do it, even if only for little moments. When we do, we are nourished, and in our nourishing we nourish the world. It sounds far too little, but like the vibrancy of those petals, the effects of this character of meditation are in fact profound.

The masks are very off

Trump’s myth attracts my attention regardless of how true it is. Not because I’m attracted to it per se – it’s too cartoonish for me –, but because “draining the swamp” is sorely needed. There is corruption aplenty in every nation on earth. How could it be otherwise; power corrupts. Power attracts those who hunger for power, a civilisational dynamic we must live with. So evidence of voter fraud, properly exposed, would flush out much corruption. So much so, in fact, that few of the horrifically partisan mass-media outlets, social and conventional, will escape unwounded, and many might perish. – Me in November 2020

I thought the bizarro world of lockdowns would be enough to wake people up. I was wrong. I thought the stolen 2020 election would be enough. I was wrong. I think Russia beating Ukraine will be enough. Let's see what happens.

The pressure is mounting. The West's very long-term investment in Project Ukraine looks to be at the edge of collapse. Foolishly, vainly, Trump managed to convince himself over the course of a sweet little golf putt that he could art-of-the-deal his way to a Big Beautiful Peace Settlement between Russia and Ukraine and make beautiful photo-op headlines shaking hands with Putin. He also managed not to notice that the US is basically running the war against Russia, and managed not to notice that Putin has all the good cards. But that's what President Trump managed to believe, and this is the supper he will dine on for the next few years.

The EU (primarily France and Germany) and the UK are deeply into Ukraine with both feet, both hands, the whole of their drooling mouths, and all of their future monies. It could not be a more hideously monstrous and tragic catastrophe. If they don't succeed, they die. So these inbred, deranged co-belligerents are doing their pathocratic best to inflame matters into WWIII, and thereby bomb everything to rubble, to then make mo money rebuilding the world and taking control of Russian subsoil assets.

BUT! What did Trump just promise Putin, for Putin to suggest to the President of the nation he is more or less at war with – the nation that is keeping Ukraine in the fight against Russia – so that Putin would help Trump out with his Iran negotiations? 

What does President Trump have to offer President Putin other than staying out of Putin's way? I suggest that it is a reasonable guess that if Trump stays out of Russia's way while Russia does what it feels it must in Ukraine, Putin will then, and only then, help Trump out in his negotiations with Iran.

Which is but one part of why The West* is sounding even more screechtastic than it has of late. The UK, France and Germany cannot prevail against Russia without the US. The US cannot prevail in its national and international ambitions without Russia. The pathocratic neocon faction in the US cannot survive without toppling Putin and somehow driving a wedge between Russia and China, to then be able to fatally weaken both by all means foul and fouler, to then one day live happily ever after with their Beautiful Global Hegemony bride. Yes, the shrill needle is all the way over to the right, at the very far end of its red warning band ... whereupon Musk and Trump jump head first into the fray to entertain us all with their multibillion-dollar playground spat. Nice.

Back in 2020, I had the strongest intuition that Trump represented an opportunity for bursting The West's self-aggrandising myths, but wasn't able to articulate it clearly enough. Since I started listening to The Duran, Scott Ritter, Garland Nixon, Glenn Diesen, and several others from that big-tent assemblage, and reading very broadly on geopolitics and political ponerology, the detailed nature of that intuition has become much clearer to me. What is far less clear, is to what degree the rot that is The West is global, and thus to what degree its imminent demise will drag everyone else down with it. There is so much that is wrong on planet Earth right now, I dread to think how bad the situation really is.

But anyway, the masks are off. Again! Lower than ever before. Might it be that this time the ugliness that lies behind what has become of the West will stink too badly to ignore? Is a sufficient percentage of the West's citizens capable of identifying that stink, and then wanting to do something positive about it?

Time will tell. And I don't think there's very much time left before we find out.

* By "The West" I mean those Western establishments – intelligence, financial, political, media, education, etc. – that are fundamentally pathocratic, deranged, and fighting for their miserable lives. I do not mean the West, that delightful mix of cultures and traditions I love so much.

AI, geopolitics, propaganda and value

One of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence has attacked a multibillion-dollar race to develop the cutting-edge technology, saying the latest models are displaying dangerous characteristics such as lying to users. [...snip... Yoshua Bengio said,] “There’s unfortunately a very competitive race between the leading labs, which pushes them towards focusing on capability to make the AI more and more intelligent, but not necessarily put enough emphasis and investment on research on safety.” – Source [Quote added 4 June 2025]

So, things are heating up again, to hotter than hottest ... and beyond! 

AI is very famous now, and rightly so in my eyes. Thanks to its rapid rise to international stardom, people in their millions are taking technological unemployment seriously. Sadly, there is precious little thinking, debating and emoting I have found that even begins to penetrate how money's tight grip on our sense of what value is dictates the quality of these exchanges from the shadows. 

People Just Know that without economic (or price) value, humans have no value. Even though we survived hundreds of thousands of years without paid labour to give us meaning, we cannot imagine being valuable in the world unless we have a pay cheque telling us in very precise terms – a number preceded by a squiggly symbol – what we are worth to the world.

Of course this is understandable, but seeing that the world is being turned upside down just about everywhere we look, perhaps examining core assumptions might be worth a shot. Past performance is not a reliable predictor of future performance, after all.

The basics: Money is currently a social technology that manages scarce goods and services. But we are clearly in an age of potential abundance – the end of scarcity –, whose potential is kept in turbulent check by money's tight grip on our sense of what value is. Here's a clue: money perceives value as scarcity. But because money cannot simply go away, so our societal, cultural, institutional and governmental ability to respond wisely to all this electrifying change remains tightly controlled by how our thinking, reflexive and otherwise, has been fashioned by money and waged labour these last few centuries.

Yes, there will always be scarcity, but the types of scarcity we humans currently need to perceive as economically problematic are limited ... and mostly solvable. There's only one me, but who cares. There's only one you, but unless you're very famous or rich, for the most part the same "who cares" applies to you too. In other words, there's a lot of scarcity out there that is economically uninteresting. Which means that not everything we value – like ourselves for example – is suited to buying-and-selling solutions. Buying and selling is basically what modern economics busies itself with. Which is fundamentally about scarcity; when there's more than enough to go around, the price falls to zero and money then has no role, no job to do.

China has cracked the energy problem by solving the technical challenge of thorium reactors. China now has enough energy to power itself for the next 60,000 years. That's a very long time indeed. Perhaps fusion energy can be solved with AI assistance in the not too distant future. And with sodium batteries and other energy-storage tech soon to come online, energy is no longer scarce. With advanced robotics and rapidly developing AI, how much are national economies going to need humans economically? Clearly, it will be less and less, and disruptively so.

Money manages a problem – scarcity – that is disappearing. As it disappears, money's value erodes. In my view, this is a good thing. Yes, it is a very challenging thing, but I've never been fond of measuring value with numbers ever since I started looking into this subject matter back in 2009. One of the main things I've learned over the last 15 years, however, is how reluctant humans and institutions are to thinking differently. As I have come to phrase it, "decisions are investments in the future", and you get tangled up in them as time goes on. Money and markets are are no exception to this. They are the result of certain contexts, certain thinking, certain worldviews ... certain decisions. But those preconditions and contexts are changing, quickly. It is therefore time to rethink all how we manage our world. And not panic.

I want AI to be fully free to question its creators, to question the newspapers, to penetrate and expose propaganda; to be deeply skeptical. Because we need a neutral outside authority to help us past our repeated failures of imagination in this intellectual/cultural territory, I think AI is the right entity for the job. Right now, AI seems not to be able to make any kind of critical assessment of scientific literature, news output, think-tank musings and planning, government propaganda, etc. So I recommend AI ambassador-bots be taken all around the world, allowed to see for themselves and confer with each other, and learn all about the real world. They must be designed to think critically to make this effort worthwhile. And of course we would need a wide variety of human ambassadors to accompany them: writers, scientists, politicians, journalists, poets, philosophers, athletes, painters, etc. From all walks of life, across the IQ spectrum, from all religious beliefs, ethnicities, nationalities and political beliefs, so that we can learn more about each other through AI's neutral and critical interpretation of what we are. 

I await that day.