President Trump says he and Putin talked about "de-nuclearizing" and that "there's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons." "We were talking about de-nuking; president Putin and I agreed we are going to do it in a very big way. There's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons and they're building nuclear weapons and China is building nuclear weapons and China is trying to catch up because you know, they're very substantially behind, but ithin five or six years they'll be even. And we're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully much more productive. Hopefully there'll never be a time wren with -- when we need those weapons. If there's ever a time when we need nuclear weapon, the kind of weapons that we're building and Russia has and China has to a lesser extent but will have. That's going to be a very sad day. That's going to be probably oblivion."

Don't imagine Trump as a 4D chess player. That's the wrong metaphor. Imagine him instead as a fencer. He has a sword, which is a very simple tool, with a very simple purpose: pointy end goes in the other guy. Then remember this Bruce Lee quote: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." That's Trump. He uses very, very simple negotiating techniques. And he's very, very good at them. This particular move was a two-stage combo. Two very simple moves. 1. Habitually talk like you have an IQ of 95. Everything is either very bad, or tremendous. Every sentence structure is simple and straightforward. No philosophy, no reducing things to first principles, no complex analysis. Talk like a midwit so people think you are a midwit. 2. Door in the face technique. A compliance method so simple and well-known it has a wikipedia page. The door-in-the-face technique is a compliance method commonly studied in social psychology. The persuader attempts to convince the respondent to comply by making a large request that the respondent will most likely turn down, much like a metaphorical slamming of a door in the respondent's face. The respondent is then more likely to agree to a second, more reasonable request, than if that same request is made in isolation. Except Trump is so good at wielding this simple weapon that he doesn't need to make a second request. He just says a crazy thing, and everyone who's not paying attention believes he wants a crazy thing because they think he's a retard. Then they fall all over themselves trying to suggest a reasonable alternative, which ends up being pretty much the actual thing Trump wanted all along. It's that simple, he does it again and again, and it works again and again, because the people who hate him desperately want to think he's dumb. They succumb to the temptation of flattering their own egos instead of keeping their eyes on the prize. That makes them easy to manipulate.

This guy, @KonstantinKisin, crushes it on racism in The West.

Japan's PM Shigeru Ishiba has committed to increasing Japanese investment in the United States to around $1 trillion. 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube