Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 05 Nov 2021
The World for People who Think

Puppet Masters
Map

Mr. Potato

Liberal hysteria: California Democrat is convinced Trump sent secret message to Russians via joke

carlson swalwell
For more than a year, elected Democrats and the liberal media have alleged that President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to "steal" the 2016 election away from the "rightful winner," Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a narrative that has been steadily unraveling over time.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has grown impatient at the lack of actual evidence put forward to justify such claims or the investigations that have sprung from them, so Monday he invited one of Trump's most vociferous critics on the topic of Russia - California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee - to appear on his program.

Carlson asked Swalwell for any evidence he has seen after 18 months of investigation to back up the collusion case, according to BizPac Review.

Swalwell offered up nothing that hasn't already been made known before about tenuous business connections and marginal meetings that went nowhere, and even seemed to point to an obvious joke by Trump on the campaign trail in July 2016 where he asked the Russians if they knew the whereabouts of Clinton's 30,000 missing emails as "proof" of some sort of secret coded message to encourage Russian hacking and interference.

Comment: Mass hallucination and the assumption that your enemies are always lying is a sign of mass hysteria.


Megaphone

Putin: 'We must adhere to common rules, unilateral action leads to a dead end'

Russian President Vladimir Putin is applauded by his French counterpat Emmanuel Macron after delivering a speech during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russia May 25, 2018.
© Grigory Dukor / Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin is applauded by his French counterpat Emmanuel Macron after delivering a speech during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russia May 25, 2018.
The US should honor its international agreements, regardless of who is in the White House, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, taking aim at Donald Trump's recent decision to pull out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday, Putin said that changing international agreements along with the US presidential cycle will lead to mistrust and a breakdown in international norms.

"Every four years, presidential elections take place in the United States, so if international treaties and documents are being signed every three or four years, they're going to be re-thought. So what will be the time-frame for planning if one follows this particular regime?" Putin asked, observing that allowing such a political cycle to interfere in major international treaties will naturally "lead to an environment wrought with mistrust."

Comment: If the EU knows what's best for them, they'll forge ahead with Iran and the billion dollar deals they're making with Russia and China. And perhaps they'll end up paying for off the euro or the petro-yuan, starving out the US once and for all: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Atlantic Trade War? How Trump Breaking Iran Deal Could Dismantle US Empire


Dollars

Is this the end of the Euro?

The Therapist, 1937
© www.ReneMagritte.org
The Therapist, 1937
The Spanish government is about to fall after the Ciudadanos party decided to join PSOE (socialist) and Podemos in a non-confidence vote against PM Rajoy. Hmm, what would that mean for the Catalan politicians Rajoy is persecuting? The Spanish political crisis is inextricably linked to the Italian one, not even because they are so much alike, but because both combine to create huge financial uncertainty in the eurozone.

Sometimes it takes a little uproar to reveal the reality behind the curtain. Both countries, Italy perhaps some more than Spain, would long since have seen collapse if not for the ECB. In essence, Mario Draghi is buying up trillions in sovereign bonds to disguise the fact that the present construction of the euro makes it inevitable that the poorer south of Europe will lose against the north.

Club Med needs a mechanism to devalue their currencies from time to time to keep up. Signing up for the euro meant they lost that mechanism, and the currency itself doesn't provide an alternative. The euro has become a cage, a prison for the poorer brethren, but if you look a bit further, it's also a prison for Germany, which will be forced to either bail out Italy or crush it the way Greece was crushed.

Italy and Spain are much larger economies than Greece is, and therefore much larger problems. Problems that are about to become infinitely more painful than they would have been had the countries been able to devalue their currencies. If you want to define the main fault of the euro, it is that: it creates problems that would not have existed if the common currency itself didn't. This was inevitable from the get-go. The fatal flaw was baked into the cake.

Info

Forget Kim: It's time for a Trump-Putin summit - Now!

Putin and Trump
In the aftermath of US President Donald Trump's cancellation of his scheduled June 12 summit with North Korea's Kim Jong-un, the gathering clouds of global conflict are getting thicker and darker:


Comment: Not so fast. The Korea summit is still on the table: Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in hammer out US summit plans


Korea: The cancellation is a triumph for Trump's national security team, most if not all of whom were horrified at the prospect of his meeting personally with Kim. (There was no telling what the Big Man might agree to if he met Little Rocket Man face to face. What if Korea actually were denuclearized? There would be no more excuse for keeping American troops on the peninsula! Disaster!) From the team's perspective, scuttling the meeting altogether would be the best outcome, but derailing the date and cranking the nasty rhetoric back up will do for now. Talk of a Libyan model, even more than inclusion of B-52s in exercises with South Korea (which Trump reversed), got the job done. Now it's imperative for the national security establishment to load Trump up with nonnegotiable demands (maybe patterned on Pompeo's Iran provocation; see below) that Kim would have no choice but to refuse on the chance the summit gets rescheduled through the frantic efforts of South Korea's Moon Jae-in - and maybe of Trump himself, if he still wants a shot at that Nobel Peace Prize. Pyongyang's continued willingness to talk will register in Washington as desperation and an invitation for renewed pressure.

Dollars

Lies by omission: MSNBC's Chris Hayes neglects to mention Sheldon Adelson's influence in scrapping Iran deal

Chris Hays
© MSNBC
Chris Hays is an MSNBC commentator
Editor's Note: This excellent piece appeared at the same time that Canada's main TV Channel, CBC, ran an expose of Adelson's pernicious influence on American and Canadian politics, by simply outright buying politicians, right up to the president. We ran an article about the CBC piece earlier today.

Two leading figures on the American left, Rob Malley and Chris Hayes, cannot honestly discuss the role of Israel in foreign policy-making, specifically Sheldon Adelson's influence over Donald Trump's historic and tragic decision to scrap the Iran deal, a landmark of international diplomacy.

Malley, a former Obama security aide, gave a one-hour interview on Trump's destruction of the Iran deal and cited three reasons for Trump's decision: He wants to demolish Obama's legacy ("That's an obsession"), Trump wants to fulfill promises he made to his "base," the "electorate;" and he has advisers who counsel "regime change" in Iran.

Comment: Excerpts from that earlier article:
Prominent Canadian news broadcaster Wendy Mesley exposes the role of billionaire campaign donor Sheldon Adelson in getting the U.S. embassy moved to Jerusalem, Trump's abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, and his enormous influence in both U.S. and Canadian politics.

Broadcast on CBC's news program "The Weekly with Wendy Mesley" on May 20, 2018.


Adelson, the tenth richest man in the world and the GOP's largest donor, is known to use his money to influence policies on behalf of Israel.

After Trump tore up the Iran agreement, Adelson donated an additional $30 million to the Republican party, possibly the single largest single donation in U.S. history.

Adelson also influenced former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who endorsed Trump's embassy action and anti-Iran move, as well as Canadian conservative leader Andrew Scheer.

Mesley interviews New York Times reporter Ken Vogel, who says that Adelson has private meetings at the White House with Trump, Vice President Pence, John Bolton, and others. Israel is at the heart of Adelson's donations, who has been influenced by his Israeli wife, Miriam.

Vogel explains that Adelson is "the enforcer" for Jewish American donors who give a lot of money to Republican politicians. People are afraid to cross him.

Source: If Americans Knew



Map

Turkey and US agree on roadmap for cooperation in Syria's Manbij

US Soldier in Manbij
© AP Photo / Hussein Malla
The United States and Turkey have held talks in Ankara as part of a working group formed to settle disputes between the two nations over the presence of Kurdish militia in the Syrian city of Manbij.

Following months of disagreements between the United States and Turkey, the two NATO allies have reached a consensus regarding a roadmap to cooperate on security in Manbij.

"The two sides outlined the main contours of a roadmap for their further cooperation in ensuring security and stability in Manbij," the joint statement said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and the newly appointed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will "consider the recommendations" of the working group during their meeting, set for June 4, the statement read.

Chess

The latest maneuvers in the Sino-American game in South East Asia

Chinese shipping port
The South East Asian sub-region (SEA) remains an important link in the chain of direct as well as indirect "conflict zones", beginning on the Korean Peninsula and ending at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca, in the Sino-American standoff.

There is no scoring system to keep track of "goals, points, seconds" that could be used to determine which side is tipping the scales in its favor in this strategic game between the two world leaders in the Asia Pacific region as a whole and SEA in particular. The struggle continues with varying outcomes.

An aggregate score for three noteworthy events, connected to SEA's state of affairs, can be added to this mix and include the agreement between the USA and North Korea to hold a bilateral summit in Singapore; the outcome of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's visit to Indonesia, and the triumphant victory by Malaysia's opposition, headed by 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, in the parliamentary elections.

However, before we look at these events in greater depth, it seems appropriate to make several somewhat general statements.

Attention

Fifteen civilians wounded in Ukrainian shelling of Gorlovka, Donbass

Ukrainian shelling of Gorlovka, Donbass
The latest reports have come in from Horlovka, Donbass, indicating that around 15 peaceful, law-abiding residents have been harmed by the shelling of Kiev's forces. The civilians were wounded as part of Kiev's latest May Offensive, which cynically occurred as U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine, Kurt Volker visited the front lines. Around one thousand artillery rounds were fired at the people around the time of his visit.

According to the Mayor of Horlovka, Ivan Prikhodko, the total number of residents injured from the Ukrainian shelling, which began on May 9th, and continued throughout the May offensive has risen to 15.

Comment: More on the situation from Southfront:




Info

Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in hammer out US summit plans

Moon Jae-in bids farewell to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
© Reuters
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has held a surprise closed-door meeting with his South Korean counterpart over the cancelled summit with US President Donald Trump.

The meeting is the second of its kind in two months, with the pair sitting down at a location near the demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula

According to Reuters, this latest discussion centered on the on-off summit that was sensationally scrapped by Donald Trump, who cited "tremendous anger and open hostility" displayed by North Korea's government after they took umbrage at a comment by US Vice-President Mike Pence.


Comment: Pence's remark and the US military exercises are displays of open hostility towards N. Korea for crying out loud.


Comment: On again...maybe: Trump summit with Kim Jon-un may take place on June 12


Snowflake

Trump triggers his critics by declaring US will 'dominate the oceans'

Theodore Roosevelt strike group US Navy
© US Navy / Specialist 3rd Class Spencer Roberts / Flickr
The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group in the Indian Ocean, March 2018
Addressing the graduating class of the US Naval Academy, President Donald Trump went big on nationalism and military prowess. At one point he talked about "dominating the oceans," because, of course, the US is "surrounded by sea."

"America is the greatest fighting force for peace, justice, and freedom in the history of the world," Trump told the midshipmen in Annapolis, Maryland. "We are not going to apologize for America. We are going to stand up for America. No more apologies."

Repeating the claim that the US has the lowest number of ships since 1917, Trump promised a naval expansion of the current 280-or-so fleet to "355 beautiful ships." What would all those ships do? He was happy to explain, in typical Trump fashion.

Comment: Reality check for Trump's critics - the US has been dominating the planet since Trump was in diapers. Reality check for Donald Trump - Russia's hypersonic missiles probably rendered America's entire navy obsolete.

Check out: