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by Geoffrey Grinder, Now The End Begins: Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel is bragging about having 100,000 doses of the COVID vaccine ready in 2019, just as we told you back in 2021 Back on July 16th, 2021, we brought you a Prophecy News Podcast showing you how pharmaceutical company named Moderna has already created a […]
Escobar: Dancing To Trump’s Disco Inferno
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
In the late 1970s Donald Trump, in his early thirties, cocky as ever and recently married to Ivana in 1977, could be seen on and off hitting the electric New York City night life especially at glamour/hard partying disco dive Studio 54.
A certified dancefloor killer at Studio 54 was Disco Inferno by The Trammps, mixed by dance wizard Tom Moulton, released in 1976, two years before perennial Trump favorite YMCA – now resuscitated to global furor as the soundtrack to Trump 2.0 dance moves.
For all practical purposes, Trump is now the DJ turning the whole planet into a Disco Inferno (“folks are screaming, out of control”), as everything is “so entertaining when the boogie started to explode”. And the Trump “boogie” serially exploding is no less than the non-stop amplified sound of theater, bombast and uncontrolled chaos.
The spectacle of Trump’s sound and fury – a torrent of executive orders, photo ops, carefully scripted illusionist tricks, breathless headlines – signifying…something veils the same old imperial mindset, now blasting out in the open as a weaponized three-ring circus. Stagecraft invariably trumps substance as every smirk and scowl is media-weaponized to the enthralled, bloodthirsty arena spectators.
Mr. Disco Inferno won a mini-trade war with Colombia in only 10 hours, after posting an image depicting himself as an Al Capone-style Mafia boss in pinstripe suit and fedora hat, standing next to a sign that reads “FAFO”, which means “F**k Around and Find Out”.
He will win the proxy war in Ukraine. In 24 hours. Sorry, in 100 days. Sorry, maybe more. And “if they don’t settle this war soon, like almost immediately, I’m going to put massive tariffs on Russia and massive taxes and also big sanctions.” Why? Because, “you know, I love the Russian people.”
He brags that the United States “has the largest amount of oil and gas” (it does not) and is going to use it; he will “ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down oil prices” (they will say no); because if “the oil price came down, the war in Ukraine would end immediately” (this is definitely not a “cause and effect” case).
He will make “the largest tax cuts in US history.” The US can ensure LNG supplies to Europe (of course, at a huge mark-up); the US “does not need Canada to make cars, as well as Canadian oil and gas”;the United States’ “massive oil and gas reserves” will allow it to “become a manufacturing superpower and the world capital of AI and cryptocurrencies”.
Buried in the sound and fury is the fact that the US can count on a steady stream of gas for domestic needs but that turns problematic when it comes to exports. Hence the expropriation obsession – as in outright Empire of Plunder: the US badly needs Iraqi, Syrian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Iranian and Russian reserves. Because even if carefully exported, there is insufficient liquification facilities in the US to supply the EU. And that’s why Europe remains largely dependent on Russian LNG and other sources since the sabotage of the Nordstreams.
Yes: there is incoming blood on the dancefloor.
To get into the real groove of Disco Inferno, we might as well focus on the top three challenges for Trump 2.0:
the tech war against China;
the geoeconomics war against the Global Majority;
and the proxy war in Ukraine.
The irruption of Hangzhou-based Chinese tech start-up DeepSeek on the global stage was something for the ages, instantly decimating the spun-to-death “small yard, high fence” American strategy to smash China’s tech advances.
DeepSeek should indeed be seen as the “biggest dark horse” in the open-source Large Language Model (LLM) domain, now identified from Jakarta to Wall Street and Silicon Valley as potentially Beijing’s secret weapon in the AI war with the US. Even Mr. Disco Inferno was forced to admit DeepSeek’s breakthrough as a “wake-up call”.
At the heart of the matter we find two clashing models: neoliberal hypercapitalism versus meritocratic socialism.
The head of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng, is a fascinating geek. His given name (Wenfeng) means “Vanguard of Culture”; one of the meanings of his family name (Liang) is “bridge”. So he may be seen – as he is in China – as Mr. Bridge to the Vanguard of Culture (here’s Mr. Bridge in an excellent interview , in Chinese; please use auto-translate).
Mr. Bridge pulled a spectacular Sun Tzu on US sanctions over exporting advanced graphic processing units (GPUs), especially Nvidia’s advanced chips. Moreover, Chinese Big Tech firms cannot compete with the financial firepower of US Big Tech.
So the answer was to develop cost-efficient powerful LLM models, without access to literally hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H100s chips. DeepSeek stated they had used just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and only $5.6million to train a model with 671 billion (italics mine) parameters: that’s a very small fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train models of the same size.
And everything was developed locally, via scores of PHDs from the top Chinese universities – Peking, Tsinghua, Beihang – and not American Ivy League experts.
So in a nutshell DeepSeek is a 100% Chinese LLM companywhich was capable to come up with open-source models and a free downloadable app for every consumer to use. That in itself destroys the current American-imposed neoliberal hypercapitalist AI business model.
The rules of the game indeed are being rewritten. So what is the – predictable – American response? Call for more sanctions. In parallel, DeepSeek was forced to suspend new registrations because its site suffered a massive cyberattack. Talk about the price to pay for eviscerating a humongous $1 trillion off the techno-feudalists gathered at the New York Stock Exchange.
Mr. Disco Inferno of course supports the commodifying of all data compared to free data for everyone. Right before the DeepSeek shock, he had – theoretically – secured as much as $1 trillion from the Saudis, including to a large extent investments to develop AI and data centers in the US.
The new game of course is just beginning. Stargate, OpenAI’s joint venture with Japan’s SoftBank, also heavily plugged by Trump, plans to spend at least $100 billion on AI infrastructure in the US. In parallel, Elon Musk’s xAI is massively expanding the Colossus supercomputer to contain more than 1million GPUs to help train its Grok AI models.
Now to the war against the Global Majority. Inestimable Prof. Michael Hudson is adamant: in an absolutely must read essay, he concisely explains that “when Trump promised his voters that the United States must be the ‘winner’ in any international trade or financial agreement, he is declaring economic war on the rest of the world.”
The key Hudson take away: If nations in the Global South are to save their economy “from being plunged into austerity, price inflation, unemployment and social chaos”, they will have to “suspend payments on foreign debts denominated in dollars.”
It’s a work in progress: “Circumstances…are forcing the world to break away from the US-centered financial order. The US dollar’s exchange rate is going to soar in the short term as a result of Trump blocking imports with tariffs and trade sanctions. This exchange-rate shift will squeeze foreign countries owing dollar debts in the same way that Mexico and Canada are to be squeezed. To protect themselves, they must suspend dollar debt service.”
There may be serious problems ahead for Mr. Disco Inferno: “Trump’s America First political theater that got him elected may get his gang unseated as the contradictions and consequences of their operating philosophy are recognized and replaced. His tariff policy will accelerate US price inflation and, even more fatally, cause chaos in US and foreign financial markets. Supply chains will be disrupted, interrupting US exports of everything from aircraft to information technology. And other countries will find themselves obliged to make their economies no longer dependent on US exports or dollar credit.”
Prof. Hudson notes how Trump “thinks that the US economy is like a cosmic black hole, that is, a center of gravity able to pull all the world’s money and economic surplus to itself. That is the explicit aim of America First. That is what makes Trump’s program a declaration of economic war on the rest of the world. There is no longer a promise that the economic order sponsored by US diplomacy will make other countries prosperous. The gains from trade and foreign investment are to be sent to and concentrated in America.”
The EU, in the Global North, is even more vulnerable to “America First”. Davos came and went with a mere blip on the screen, apart from the odd US banker bragging about “peak pessimism” in Europe – linked to the incoming Trump tariff tsunami – and head of the European Central Bank Christine “Look at my new Hermes scarf” Lagarde wondering it was “not pessimistic” to say that Europe is facing an “existential crisis”.
The US-EU trade balance stands at a hefty 1.5 trillion euros a year, including massive Atlanticist investment flows. But what really matters is the financial mess in individual EU nations, especially top two Germany and France, with their Via Dolorosa to be extended ad infinitum when it comes to their cost of borrowing driven by tax cuts in the US.
And now to the Forever Wars front.
Mr. Disco Inferno, posing as a humanitarian for the non-stop camera clicking, has asked vassals Jordan and Egypt to de facto become accomplices in ethnic cleansing, absorbing as many as 1.5 million people from Gaza. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly “prohibits the forced transfer of protected people out of or into occupied territory”.
Turning a genocide into a real estate opportunity in a “phenomenal location” will proceed in parallel with energetically courting the Saudis, after MbS in Riyadh promised last week to invest at least $600 billion – and up to a possible $1 trillion – in the US.
The official Saudi position is on the necessity of “strategic investments” to “stabilize long-term revenue streams” – not to mention consolidate lavish spending on all those US-made weapons systems. Call it a classic geopolitical case of Power of Capital merging with The Strategy of Chaos.
Telling Riyadh how to dance is one thing. To entice the Russian bear to the dancefloor is a completely different proposition.
As star French historian Emmanuel Todd has brilliantly demonstrated , “Trump’s job will be to manage the defeat of the US against Russia.” That’s the toughest call ever. Trump’s supreme anathema is to be seen as a loser.
So there are only two feasible options.
1. To “end the war” by not really ending it, just postponing it to the end of the decade, stealing a de facto Russian victory via massive spin and a gargantuan P.R. campaign.
2. Keep weaponizing Kiev – especially via NATO vassals, while posing as a peacemaker who cannot deliver because of Russia. That will be a toxic variant of the current “war until the last Ukrainian”.
That kind of gimmickry won’t fly in Moscow. Putin and the Security Council have made it extensively clear the conditions for a real end to the war – not a pause for NATO rearmament.
The authentic-or-not 100-day plan for a possible deal that has been circulating in the Washington-London-Kiev echo chambers touches on a few probabilities: a Putin-Trump phone call in the next two weeks or so; a possible meeting, bilateral (Trump-Putin) or trilateral (with the Ukrainian actor; quite unlikely) until mid-March; start of negotiations on the main parameters; a possible ceasefire by Easter; an International Peace Conference by the end of April, mediated by US, China, some EU members and some from the Global South; presidential elections in Ukraine at the end of August.
Key parameters: Ukraine as a neutral state, and not a member of NATO; member of the EU by 2030; Ukraine does not reduce the size of the army; does not officially recognize Russian sovereignty over conquered territories; “some” sanctions against Russia lifted immediately after the conclusion of the peace agreement, some – over the course of three years – depending on Russia’s compliance; all restrictions on the import of Russian energy to the EU to be lifted; and last but not least, the thorny matter of a “European peacekeeping contingent”.
The CIA is feeding all sorts of misinformation to Trump on everything from the real state of things in the battlefield to the state of the Russian economy. As it stands, Russians watch all the bombast with barely a smirk. Peskov: “Moscow still hasn’t received word from Washington about possible Trump, Putin contact… Readiness for meeting remains.”
So far, nothing. Totally empty game playing. Perhaps Trump, in secrecy, may be practicing his master shot: “The heat was on, rising to the top / Everybody going strong, and that is when my spark got hot”.
Time to hit the dancefloor.
(Just can’t stop) when my spark gets hot
(Just can’t stop) when my spark gets hot
(Just can’t stop) when my spark gets hot
(Just can’t stop) when my spark gets hot
Well, it may turn out that the really hot spark will be detonated not by Mr. Disco Inferno, but by dance partner Vladimir Putin.
* * *
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/31/2025 – 23:25
Six Americans detained in Venezuela were released Friday and returned to the United States with President Donald Trump’s special envoy, following his meeting with President Nicolas Maduro who called for a “new beginning” in ties with Washington. “We are wheels up and headed home with these 6 American citizens. They just spoke to @realDonaldTrump and […]
The post Venezuela frees six Americans, Trump envoy says after Maduro meet appeared first on Insider Paper.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) were among the Pennsylvania lawmakers who responded to reports of a plane crash at a mall in Philadelphia.
The post Sen. John Fetterman, Gov. Josh Shapiro Respond to Plane Crash in Philadelphia appeared first on Breitbart.
A plane crash in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, resulted in a large explosion setting several buildings on fire. Six people onboard the aircraft appear to have died in the crash, including a pediatric patient.
The post Plane Crash in Philadelphia Leads to Explosions, Buildings on Fire appeared first on Breitbart.
A small jet with six people onboard crashed into a busy Philadelphia suburb Friday, officials said, showering wreckage over a wide areas and sparking blazes that caused extensive damage to homes and vehicles. The aircraft, which the Federal Aviation Administration said was a Learjet 55 executive aircraft, crashed around 2330 GMT into the densely-populated district […]
The post Destruction as executive jet crashes in Philadelphia, sparking blazes appeared first on Insider Paper.
US ‘In Contact’ With Russia, Trump Confirms
President Donald Trump has acknowledged that the United States and Russia are “in contact” related to the tragic events of the American Airlines passenger plane colliding with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter Wednesday evening near Reagan National airport in Washington D.C.
All 64 passengers and crew members aboard Flight 5342 perished, while the three US servicemembers on board the H-60 Black Hawk were killed. No one survived the crash in the Potomac River. Among the 16 figure-skaters on board, two well-known skating coaches who were Russian nationals died: Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov.
Trump in a Thursday briefing told reporters: “We had a Russian contingent – some very talented people – unfortunately on that plane,” emphasizing of the deadly tragedy that he’s “Very, very sorry about that.”
“We’ve already been in contact with Russia,” Trump said in response to a question from a reporter. He pledged that the the US “will facilitate” the transfer of the remains of any Russian nationals who died in the crash, and that sanctions and flight bans into Russia will not impact this.
The Kremlin has since clarified that this did not involve direct contact between Presidents Putin and Trump.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has since indicated there may have been up to four Russian citizens on board the plane when it went down: “According to our embassy, three victims of this plane crash had Russian passports. There is confirmation regarding another, a fourth person who could hold a Russian passport, this information is currently being verified,” the diplomat said.
Despite Trump’s positive words of condolence, Zakharova strongly suggested that the US side hasn’t been very responsive to Russian requests:
“Our embassy is communicating with the US Department of State on the entire range of issues,” Zakharova assured reporters, even as it “looks like a one-way communication.” The Russian embassy has been asking questions, “but we have not received substantive responses so far. However, there is communication, and we have been given some general replies,” she explained.
“We are grateful to the American authorities, with whom we are in constant contact, for the words of support expressed to the families of the victims and their readiness to help with the transfer of the remains to their homeland,” the Russian embassy said in a statement on Thursday.
The question of how quickly Trump and Putin might directly engage in frank dialogue related to seeking to wind down the Ukraine war is being watched by many.
There’s a likelihood of lower level talks which could hammer out the parameters of such initial dialogue. But the expected Trump-Putin phone call quickly on the heels of Trump’s inauguration doesn’t appear to have happened yet.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/31/2025 – 18:00
Meta is considering whether to move its incorporation to Texas, a US state seen as amenable to companies run by big shareholders like Mark Zuckerberg, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The social media giant has been incorporated in Delaware since 2004, when the company was known as Facebook. A shift to Texas by Meta […]
The post Meta mulling incorporation shift to Texas: report appeared first on Insider Paper.