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Netanyahu takes credit for fall of Syrian government as Israel advances on Golan Heights
(peoplesdispatch.org)
couldn't agree more
yeah this is super cool stuff :)
I think he actually gets that part, hence why he's freaking out over countries moving off the dollar. What he doesn't get is that he can't just bully to get his way.
she found the most fitting place for herself https://www.ned.org/ned-welcomes-victoria-nuland-to-the-board-of-directors/
Turns out the point was so the west could moralize the developing world about their increasing energy use.
Yup
Same, I think the next few months are going to be the most dangerous in human history.
Basically, I think that China has no choice but to keep dedollarizing. If they don't then it's just going to be worse for them when the US starts stealing their foreign assets, cutting them out of SWIFT, and so on. They have to do it on their terms while they have leverage. Given that China has to dedollarize, they cannot possibly accept Trump's demand to stop trading outside the dollar.
China will say we're happy to keep trading in dollars, but it's our business if we want to use other currencies. At that point the US has to decide whether they start putting 100% tariffs on China and countries trading with China. If they do, then the US economy is likely gonna crash cause prices on everything will shoot through the roof overnight. On top of that, countries will be forced to pick whether trade with China or trade with US is more essential to them.
I think it's likely that Trump is bluffing, and the US walks it back when China says no, but you never know. I do think that the economic war with Russia gives us some idea of what to expect. The US pulled the trigger on trying to cut Russia out, and we see that major countries like China and India did not fall in line. At that point the whole scheme collapsed. Trying to cut China out of world trade is even more absurd in my opinion, and putting 100% tariff would be tantamount to that.
We can't underestimate sheer ignorance and stupidity on the part of the US. Plenty of people warned that the trade war with Russia would have disastrous consequences for the west, but that didn't stop the US from pulling the trigger. I don't think anything has been learned over the past three years.
For me, the biggest selling point is that it's both expressive and simple. Most languages tend to be one or the other. You have languages like C that are relatively simple to learn, but it takes a lot of code to express what you're trying to do semantically, and you end up with a lot of incidental boilerplate in the process. At the other end of the spectrum you have languages like Haskell or Scala that let you write very concise code, but the cost is the mental overhead of understanding complex syntax and tons of language rules.
Lisps show that you can have a small language with minimal syntax and simple semantics that can be extremely expressive. Our of all the languages I've used over the years, I've enjoyed working in Lisp the most. At this point you couldn't pay me enough to use anything else.
The problem US has is that the countries at the centre of BRICS are too big for them to take on.