[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Seoul, South Korea (CNN) North Korea said it would close a key missile test facility in the presence of “international experts” and potentially destroy its primary nuclear complex if the United States agrees to corresponding measures, South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced in a joint press conference with Kim Jong Un Wednesday.
The two leaders made the announcement on the second day of a three-day summit, their third this year, as part of efforts with the United States to contain the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula.
Speaking to the media Wednesday after a brief signing ceremony, Kim and Moon vowed to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula once and for all, something they first committed to at their April summit.
“The world is going to see how this divided nation is going to bring about a new future on its own,” Kim said to applause from those gathered.
Moon and Kim teased a potential historic fourth meeting between the two leaders, this time in the South Korean capital. The signed agreement stated that Kim would travel to Seoul “as soon as possible,” something no North Korean leader has ever done. Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, agreed to visit Seoul, but never followed through.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this still frame taken from video taken September 19.
Both countries’ defense chiefs also signed a 17-page accord in which the two countries vowed to “cease all hostile acts against each other.”
“The era of no war has started,” said Moon, the first South Korean president to visit Pyongyang since 2007. “Today the North and South decided to remove all threats that can cause war from the entire Korean peninsula.”
The two countries also pledged to:
- Submit a joint bid to host the 2032 Summer Olympics.
- Create rail and road links between North and South within the next year.
- Stop military drills aimed at each other along the Military Demarcation Line, which divides the two countries, by November 1.
- Remove 11 guard posts in the demilitarized zone by the end of the year.
- Normalize the Kaesong Industrial complex and Kumgang tourism project as soon as the conditions allow.
...and beating the natives with sticks whenever they don’t work hard enough.
The kind of ruthless racial self-assertion that these Chinks engage in is world-beating. Whites can’t compete with it. Not now that we have sunk into the abyss of altruism.
As Baudelaire said: The world belongs to the one who doesn’t care. These Chinamen don’t care.
It wasn’t that long ago that Whites were as hardcore as these Chinamen. Ask yourself: is the world really a better place now that they’re not?
“Western countries need to study these Chinese techniques and adopt them.”
Not adopt them. Whites need to adapt ruthless ferocity to the ethnonationalist cause. In the two examples, one would be correct, and one would not.
Where Islamic incursions are quelled, that is correct.
Going to an African country, enslaving them, beating them and so on - when it is not sheer self defense - is not.
But of course, such bad advice (e.g., that we should be brutal slave masters over Africans) is typical of right wing reactionaries - to look for a foundation in natural fallacy, in sheer might makes right supremacism beyond the complexity of social praxis. ...and, of course, when praxis is ignored, then broader patterns of nemesis correction are in store for the hubris.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 09 September 2018 22:27.
The Hill, “Trump: Japan ties could sour when ‘I tell them how much they have to pay”, 6 Sept 2018:
President Trump touted his good relations with Japan on Thursday but warned the relationship may sour over trade.
“Of course that will end as soon as I tell them how much they have to pay,” the president said of his strong ties with Japan in a call to Wall Street Journal assistant editor James Freeman.
Freeman shared the president’s remarks in a WSJ op-ed published Thursday. Freeman said Trump had called him shortly after the editor appeared in a segment on the Fox News Channel praising the president for the strong U.S. economy.
Trump’s comments about Japan come as the U.S. finds itself in a number of trade fights with allies and other countries.
Trump has slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. And he has threatened new tariffs on auto imports. Japan’s trade minister in August warned the country could possibly retaliate.
Trump last week announced a trade deal with Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement. The U.S. is separately negotiating with Canada but both countries have dug in during the contentious talks.
Trump has warned he is willing to go ahead and sign the deal with Mexico if Canada does not get on board.
“[T]here is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal,” Trump tweeted last week.
Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has vowed his country is “not going to accept is that we should have to sign a bad deal just because the president wants it.”
Trump is also escalating a trade war with China. Trump has floated another $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.
Stratford, “Japan’s Built-in Resistance to Pressure”, 5 Sept 2018:
Past protectionist pushes by the United States prompted Japan to build up a degree of insulation that could help it weather the current tariff threat. Even as it pursued its Cold War-era strategy to build up the Japanese economy as a U.S. bulwark in the Pacific, the United States moved to protect the U.S. domestic sector from Japanese competition. In the 1970s, the United States piled pressure on Japan, which ultimately agreed to self-imposed voluntary export restrictions on automobiles, which lasted from 1981 to 1994. This squeeze on Japanese automakers spurred a flurry of joint ventures and the movement of Japanese production onto U.S. shores.
Between 1978 and 1989, the top seven Japanese carmakers each set up production in the United States — an acceleration that gathered momentum with production of Japanese cars climbing from 620,000 units in 1986 to 2.15 million by 1994. This trend of increased Japanese manufacturing in the United States has continued to strengthen. The number of vehicles manufactured by Japanese carmakers in the U.S. rose from 3.3 million to nearly 4 million between 2006 and 2016. And of the 20 most popular light-duty vehicles sold on the U.S. market, five were Japanese models containing upwards of 50 percent of components produced in the United States.
The strong onshore presence of Japanese production facilities will partly blunt the effectiveness of the tariff tactics as the United States presses Japan to enter a bilateral dialogue. Japan still holds out hope that it can persuade the United States to reverse course on its abandonment of the CPTPP. This trade agreement fits more into Japan’s overall strategy in the Asia-Pacific to counter China’s rise by pulling the Asia-Pacific region’s economy more closely into both the U.S. and Japanese orbits. During the most recent high-level meeting of U.S. and Japanese trade officials on Aug. 9 — more than two months after the auto tariff threat — Japan continued to seek a U.S. return to the CPTPP, and the United States continued to push for bilateral talks. Instead of caving to U.S. pressure, Japan has offered up expanded investment, increased purchases of U.S. natural gas and large-scale military procurements in hopes of mollifying Washington by chipping away at the trade deficit.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, right, visited Tokyo in May where he agreed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cooperate on investment in infrastructure projects overseas. Reuters
Asian Review, “Japan and China take first step toward joint infrastructure abroad”, 4 Sept 2018:
Thai high-speed rail among candidates to be discussed at inaugural committee this month
TOKYO—Japan and China are moving ahead with their plans to cooperate on overseas infrastructure projects, with a newly established public-private committee scheduled to hold its first meeting in late September in Beijing.
A high-speed rail project in Thailand is seen as the first candidate for cooperation.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met in Tokyo in May and agreed to cooperate on infrastructure projects in third countries. Abe is considering visiting China in October and seeks to reach agreements on specific projects there.
Japan aims to avoid excessive competition with China on infrastructure projects by collaborating. Showing support for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative could also lead to better bilateral ties. China, for its part, seeks to avoid being labeled overseas as a disreputable investor by bringing Japan on board.
The public-private committee’s first meeting will be led by Hiroto Izumi, special adviser to the prime minister, from Japan, as well as Gao Yan, a vice minister of commerce, and Ning Jizhe, a vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, from China. Senior officials from Japan’s top business lobby, Keidanren, will also participate.
The committee discussion will form the basis for a high-level bilateral forum on cooperation to take place when Abe visits China. Tokyo and Beijing are planning to sign memorandums of understanding on 20 to 30 projects then.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 30 August 2018 08:43.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor #Orban met today in #Italy with the Italian Minister of Interior, Matteo #Salvini.
The two announced that they will form an alliance uniting all anti-immigration forces in Europe ahead of next year’s election to the European Parliament.
Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban met with the Italian Minister of The Interior, Matteo Salvini today, as they seek a solution to the European Union immigration crisis. At the press conference, the two leaders announced that they will form an anti-immigration front ahead of next year’s elections to the European Parliament.
Victor Orban didn’t hide the fact that the Italian Minister of Interior has made a huge impression on him. Salvini has earlier made a name for himself as one of the most ardent opponents of the EU’s open door immigration policy.
Orban: “I would like to get to know him personally. He is my hero and my companion of destiny. I’m a great admirer and I feel that I have some experiences that I could share with him.”
According to Orban, the people who control European institutions, such as the The European Commission and The European Parliament, need to be replaced if the EU’s immigration policy is to be changed.
Orban: “The European elections are coming-up in May. We want to change a lot, but for that to happen, we need a new European Parliament and a new European commission which will start to protect Europe’s borders.”
Salvini announced that he wants to join forces with Orban ahead of the elections in order to shape The European Union’s new immigration policy.
Salvini: “We have been working for weeks with Germany to find a solution to the issue of immigrants who arrived in Italy and then went to Germany. The most important thing for us is that Italy will not take any new migrants.
Obran stressed that Italy’s quest to stop migrants is vital to the whole of Europe.
Orban: Salvini is very popular in Hungary since he has shown that it is possible to stop migrants from crossing the sea. Out of all Mediterranean countries, Italy is the only one to have done it. Salvini is the first, and Europe’s security depends upon his success.”
Viktor Orban has been in opposition to the immigration policy favored by The European Commission and Angela Merkel for years; lately, he has gained allies, such as Poland and Italy.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 16 August 2018 06:16.
Observer, “Mueller Finally Starts to Target Trump’s Israel Ties”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump.
Our media has followed the Justice Department’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia closely for more than a year, with each revelation getting granular analysis amid endless television coverage. No news here is too small to avoid hours of talking-head pontification. Yet, it appears that a significant aspect of the inquiry, one that calls the conventional narrative of the case into question, has been missing from public view—until now.
A genuine bombshell dropped yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere. It came in an interview with Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy advisor who pled guilty last October to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian agents—especially Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor with suspicious Kremlin ties—during the president’s election campaign. As expected, Mangiante explained that her husband, whom she married just three months ago, is innocent of what he admitted he did, and in no way was working for Russian intelligence.
“George had nothing to do with Russia,” she explained, seemingly in an effort to convince the White House that Papadopoulos lacks any dirt on the president’s Kremlin connections that could assist Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of Team Trump. However, what Mangiante said next was the real shocker: her husband “pled guilty because [Mueller’s prosecutors] threatened to charge him with being an Israeli agent.”
Wait, what?
According to his wife, who insists that George Papadopoulos has nothing to do with Russia, he was facing criminal charges of being a spy for Israel. An attentive reader of her interview will note that Mangiante at no point denied that this accusation.
The notion is hardly implausible. Before joining the Trump campaign in early March 2016, Papadopoulos was a self-styled energy consultant who was known for taking strongly pro-Israeli positions in print. To boot, during the 2016 campaign, he met with an Israeli settler leader and assured him that Donald Trump, if elected president, would take a favorable view of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Then there’s the backstory to Papadopoulos’ infamous May 10, 2016 meeting at an upscale London wine bar with Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner (i.e. ambassador) to Britain. At that hard-drinking affair, the young Trump staffer informed Downer that Russia possessed derogatory information about Hillary Clinton—a claim the Australian diplomat found so troubling that he shared it with Australian security officials, who passed it on to their American partners, thus officially beginning the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Kremlin ties.
That fateful boozy chat was set up by an unnamed Israeli diplomat. This fact, namely that “the meeting came about through a series of connections involving an Israeli diplomat who introduced Papadopoulos to an Australian counterpart,” was reported at the end of last year, “sourced from four current and former American and foreign officials.” This revelation has not been rebutted, nor has it received the attention it deserves. Given that a high percentage of Israeli diplomats serving abroad are spies, this story needs further investigation.
Moreover, there are strange Israeli footprints all over the Trump-Russia story. Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which reportedly possesses close links to Putin and his Kremlin. The recent BBC report that Cohen accepted at least $400,000 from the Ukrainian government to set up a substantive meeting with President Trump last year included the tantalizing detail that this dirty deal ran through attendees of Chabad of Port Washington.
Then there’s the explosive New York Times report just two weeks ago about a hush-hush meeting in Trump Tower on August 3, 2016—less than two months after the other hush-hush meeting there with Kremlin operatives—between Team Trump and George Nader, who reportedly offered Donald Trump, Jr. help with getting his father elected. According to the Times, Nader proffered unofficial (and probably illegal) foreign aid to the Republican nominee’s campaign, including from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
That day, Nader brought with him Joel Zamel, an Israeli expert in several things that were of interest to Team Trump, including social media manipulation. Zamel is known to possess a close relationship with a bunch of former Israeli intelligence officials, and Nader reportedly paid him a large sum, perhaps as much as $2 million, after Trump’s election as compensation for Zamel’s shadowy social media assistance to the president-elect’s campaign in (both men also visited the White House).
Zamel is best known as the founder of Wikistrat, a private intelligence firm that was founded in 2010, ostensibly as a “crowdsourced” geopolitical analysis outfit. Although it’s based in Washington, D.C., as The Daily Beast recently uncovered, “Wikistrat is, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli firm; and that the company’s work was not just limited to analysis. It also engaged in intelligence collection.” For this reason, Wikistrat is under investigation by Team Mueller, whose investigators have interviewed Zamel, while FBI agents have traveled to Israel to dig deeper. Several prominent Wikistrat staffers formerly worked for Israeli intelligence—and some experienced espionage professionals in our nation’s capital wonder if they still do.
Israeli espionage against the United States is a perennially touchy subject in Washington. This issue is admitted frankly in counterintelligence circles—and nowhere else. Israel constitutes a unique case. Although it’s a close ally and intelligence partner of ours—the relationship between the National Security Agency and the Israel Defense Force’s Unit 8200, its Israeli equivalent, is exceptionally close—Israel also spies on America aggressively. Year in and year out, Israel ranks in the Big Four counterintelligence threats to the United States, alongside Russia, China and Cuba. It’s not politic to mention this in polite society, however, so the counterspies know a lot about Israel’s spying on us, keeping mum outside their esoteric realm.
Indeed, some counterintelligence pros in Washington have a rather different take on the Mueller inquiry than most Americans do. While Moscow’s secret role in subverting our election in 2016 is plain to see and is now denied only by the willfully obtuse or congenitally dishonest, detecting a direct Kremlin hand on the Trump campaign is trickier. Trump’s links to Moscow are visible but remain somewhat obscure.
His ties to Israel, however, are much plainer to see. Based on the available evidence to date, Team Trump’s 2016 links to shadowy Israelis appear just as troubling as those to dodgy Russians—indeed, in some cases they are the very same people. As a veteran counterspy in our Intelligence Community whom I’ve known for years recently asked me with a wry smile, “What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?”
That’s a provocative question, but it merits consideration beyond counterintelligence circles. After all, Putin and his retinue have ample reason to feel let down by Trump. His greasy obsequiousness to Moscow aside, the president’s policies towards Russia have hardly pleased the Kremlin. Sanctions on Russia remain in effect, NATO’s military posture near Russia’s borders is more robust than a couple years ago, and Ukraine is now getting the anti-tank missiles that the previous White House denied it. Unlike so many of Trump’s assertions, his claim that he’s tougher on Moscow than President Barack Obama happens to be true from any policy perspective.
But not so with Israel. Unlike Obama, Trump has gone whole-hog for the Israeli right-wing, boosting Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, who openly despised Obama, at every opportunity. The recent move of our embassy to Jerusalem, long desired by the Israeli Right, is merely the most prominent of Trump’s gifts to his pal Bibi and his ruling Likud party. Sending a right-wing American Jew who has compared his more liberal co-religionists to Nazi collaborators to serve as our ambassador sent a clear message to Israel, as did the Trump administration’s recent inability to say anything negative about the IDF’s shooting last month of more than a thousand Palestinians at the Gaza border fence, killing 60 of them. Instead, the White House blocked a United Nations resolution condemning that Israeli deed, serving as a tacit endorsement of using automatic weapons for crowd control.
Few of America’s friends around the world are happy with the Trump administration, given its habit of gleefully trashing our longstanding alliances and declaring trade wars on our allies. Israel stands as a significant exception, however, and it’s no wonder that Mueller and his investigators are trying to get to the bottom of what certain Israelis were doing in 2016 in secret to boost the Trump campaign. That answer may eventually prove just as important as Mueller’s inquiry into the Kremlin and its clandestine attack on our democracy two years ago.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst. Originally posted 06/05/18, but still relevant.
South Korean Presdient Moon Jae-in and Norht Korean leader Kim Jong Un after signing the agreement
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, right, visited Tokyo in May where he agreed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cooperate on investment in infrastructure projects overseas. Reuters
