This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — Gary Trudeau:
  
• French city of Dunkirk tests out free transport – and it works — Colin Kinniburgh, France 24: For many, the effect has been nothing short of liberating, says Vanessa Delevoye, editor of Urbis, a magazine of urban politics published by the local government. To get around town, you no longer need to look at the schedules, buy tickets or worry about parking, she says. You just hop on the bus. “It’s become a synonym of freedom,” she says, attracting those who might not otherwise have used public transport. In this largely working-class city, “people of limited means say they’ve rediscovered transport” – a prerequisite to finding a job, maintaining friendships or participating in local arts and culture.
• Feminism explains our (toxic) relationships with our smartphones — Maria Farrell in the Conversationalist: A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity. “Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students. Nearly every hand in the room shot up. “Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.” One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”
• Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system — Mike Elgan in Fast Company: Nobody likes antisocial, violent, rude, unhealthy, reckless, selfish, or deadbeat behavior. What’s wrong with using new technology to encourage everyone to behave? The most disturbing attribute of a social credit system is not that it’s invasive, but that it’s extralegal. Crimes are punished outside the legal system, which means no presumption of innocence, no legal representation, no judge, no jury, and often no appeal. In other words, it’s an alternative legal system where the accused have fewer rights. Social credit systems are an end-run around the pesky complications of the legal system. Unlike China’s government policy, the social credit system emerging in the U.S. is enforced by private companies. If the public objects to how these laws are enforced, it can’t elect new rule-makers.
• Humility — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Wienersmith:
  
• Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea — Sam Biddle at the Intercept: Sure, yes, it’s doubtful we could have “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to space travel without having first “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to rocket-borne atomic genocide, but to highlight the eventual accomplishments of NASA without acknowledging that it entailed a very close dance with a worldwide apocalypse is ahistoric and absurd. To use this comparison to goad us into another nationalist tech race with a global military power is outright dangerous — if only because the victory remains completely undefined. How would we “beat” China, exactly? Beat them at what, exactly? Which specific problems do we hope to use AI to fix? At a point in history when cities are beginning to scrutinize and outright ban “AI” technologies like facial recognition, are we sure the fixes aren’t even worse than the problems? Nationalists caught in an arms race have no time to answer questions like these or any others; they’ve got a race to win! […] Rarely does anyone explain exactly why we should ever want to beat China in this particular field, one that’s helped the government there build incredibly powerful systems of social control, civil liberty annihilation, and minority oppression — areas where the U.S. is still competitive, sure, but perhaps falling behind.
• U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses — Michael Hudson's keynote paper delivered at the 14th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy, July 21, 2019: We are still mired in the Oil War that escalated in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq, which quickly spread to Libya and Syria. American foreign policy has long been based largely on control of oil. This has led the United States to oppose the Paris accords to stem global warming. Its aim is to give U.S. officials the power to impose energy sanctions forcing other countries to “freeze in the dark” if they do not follow U.S. leadership. To expand its oil monopoly, America is pressuring Europe to oppose the Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia, claiming that this would make Germany and other countries dependent on Russia instead of on U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG). Likewise, American oil diplomacy has imposed unilateral sanctions against Iranian oil exports, until such time as a regime change opens up that country’s oil reserves to U.S., French, British and other allied oil majors. U.S. control of dollarized money and credit is critical to this hegemony. As Congressman Brad Sherman of Los Angeles told a House Financial Services Committee hearing on May 9, 2019: “An awful lot of our international power comes from the fact that the U.S. dollar is the standard unit of international finance and transactions. Clearing through the New York Fed is critical for major oil and other transactions. It is the announced purpose of the supporters of cryptocurrency to take that power away from us, to put us in a position where the most significant sanctions we have against Iran, for example, would become irrelevant.” The U.S. aim is to keep the dollar as the transactions currency for world trade, savings, central bank reserves and international lending. This monopoly status enables the U.S. Treasury and State Department to disrupt the financial payments system and trade for countries with which the United States is at economic or outright military war.