Iran says it has summoned the British ambassador over the weekend after the UK publicly came out in support of the White House assessment pinpointing Iranian forces behind last Thursday’s two tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman.
Last Friday Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the attacks were “almost certainly” carried out by Tehran. Hunt also warned of the “great risk” of Iran drifting toward war against the US and its allies during a television interview.
Crucially, Britain is set to deploy 100 Royal Marines to the Persian Gulf in order to form a “rapid reaction force” to protect UK assets in the region.
Military sources said that 100 marines from 42 Commando, based near Plymouth, will form a rapid reaction force, Special Purpose Task Group 19. They will operate from ships patrolling the region from Britain’s new naval base in Bahrain.
The marines are expected to arrive in Bahrain “within weeks” as well as a team of British experts to assist in investigating precisely what materials were used in the tanker attacks, which contradictory accounts say could have been mines or torpedoes, or even an aerial projectile.
UK defence minister and MP Tobias Ellwood told Sky’s Ridge on Sunday: “We have a substantial presence in the Middle East that looks after our interests there. We understand the Middle East, we have a number of allies there as well.”
He added that Britain would beef up its presence in coordination with US forces: “We will be working with the United States to make sure this area is safe and to make sure that we actually deescalate the tensions there but I don’t think Iran should be under any doubt [about] that fact that we will be determined to protect our assets and our interests in the region.”
Among the more interesting quotes from the Sunday Times report suggests the ease with which a direct firefight between US-UK allied forces and Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces – which patrol the vital Strait of Hormuz – could erupt:
A military source said that having marines with machine guns on the decks of warships or merchant ships was likely to see off any Iranian speedboats trying to sneak up on them.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News Sunday that while the US maintains the view that it is “unmistakable” that Iran is responsible for the attacks, and that it has “lots of data, lots of evidence” —the White House does not actually want war.
“President Trump has done everything he can to avoid war. We don’t want war,” he said. “The United States is going make sure that we take all the actions necessary, diplomatic and otherwise that achieve that outcome,” Pompeo added.
But given the potential for a rapid build-up of western forces in the already crowded Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, and with Iran’s IRGC on a heightened state of alert, it could be too little too late given both sides appear “war ready” and are already blundering precisely toward that dire scenario.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MTsrBp Tyler Durden
The old S-word bugaboo has surfaced again but the real threat comes from globalism and social progressivism…
At a dinner in his New Jersey home to which John O’Sullivan and I had both been invited, former president Richard Nixon posed the question: “What is politics?”
My response was “friend-enemy relations.”
“No,” said O’Sullivan. “It’s about finding themes for an electoral campaign.”
Our differing answers reflected a difference in backgrounds: I had just published a book on the very dark German political theorist Carl Schmitt and was a great fan of Thomas Hobbes; O’Sullivan had been a campaign advisor to Margaret Thatcher before going on to become National Review ‘s chief editor.
Of course, both of us were right. Political life in Western countries is about the organization of electoral campaigns, in which one side depicts the other as the Devil. Typically the ideological confrontations are not as substantive as they’re made to appear; the ritualized battles are waged over issues that politicians and their donors want to talk about.
I thought about this conversation while recently listening to political talking points, namely the babble coming from our Republicans and from Emmanuel Macron and his centrist coalition in France about a looming “socialist” danger. In neither country is this claim persuasive. I’m not denying that the Left isn’t demanding lots of “free stuff,” including free college education in the US, even for those who have neither the interest nor the inclination to engage in serious academic studies.Young people who hang around universities also want to restructure the economy around various “green deals,” such as the plan recently trotted out by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her Green New Deal scheme would be incredibly costly and in any case would have only minimal effect on the environment. But the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden, doesn’t seem too eager to sign on to a radical ecological proposal anyway (though he does advocate a $1.7 trillion “clean energy” plan).
Simply put, what these “socialists” want is certainly not what exists in Venezuela, China, or Cuba. None of our Democratic presidential candidates are trying to establish economies that are similarly nationalized. A Democratic administration would likely slow down economic growth and impose more PC requirements on the commercial sector. But this would hardly make us Castro’s Cuba or the former German Democratic Republic. Someone who was once a true socialist is Bernie Sanders, but even Bernie is now pushing mostly the “free stuff,” together with “intersectional politics.”
Having socialized medicine may be a good or bad thing (I personally abhor it), but as I’ve argued before, advocating for it doesn’t make one a socialist. Countries that even our Republican think tanks consider to be “capitalistt”, like Canada, Germany, and Britain, all have single-payer medical systems.
Moreover, major corporate interests are backing our political Left and don’t seem concerned that the culturally leftist Democratic presidential hopefuls plan to inflict socialism on the hand that feeds.Procter and Gamble, Citibank, Coca Cola, Gillette, and Silicon Valley lavish gifts on Democrats, while pushing LGBT, gutting the Second Amendment , expanding abortion rights , and trying to weaken national borders.
I’m sure these corporate titans aren’t interested in having the state seize their holdings and redistribute their profits. They are backing the Left because the real ideological cleavage in our society doesn’t run in any case between capitalists and socialists.
Rather, it lies, as Steve Bannon recently pointed out in the French monthly L’incorrect, between globalists and “those who value their nations and civilization.”
The center-right in Western countries has rightly or wrongly decided that it can’t win elections by designating the real Leftist enemy for what they are – globalists who want to push their social values on everyone else. So they instead attack their adversaries as “socialists,” or what Macron denounces as “les socialo-communistes.”
On immigration and abortion, the goalposts have also moved leftward – at least in national electoral campaigns. The GOP is now officially against late-term abortion or killing newly born infants, but some states are seeking to prohibit abortions at an earlier point in pregnancy. Republican operatives call for controlling illegal immigration but avoid talking explicitly about reducing immigration.
In view of what is perceived as the declining utility of highlighting “Judeo-Christian values,” the RNC will in all likelihood run against that golden oldie: “socialism.” It may also bring back such ideas as being for the individual against the state and (better yet) “getting government off our backs.” In France, it’s also “déjà vu all over again.” There the globalists are railing against the ghost of the French Communists, who once collected a quarter of the national vote. But Macron’s major opponents are now on the nationalist Right and on the multicultural globalist Left, represented by the Greens—not real socialists.
Both the French president and the GOP need to find timelier and more honest rhetoric, or else risk losing more elections and partisan support. The socialist bugaboo has a limited shelf life, which may expire far sooner than its critics realize.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IQ77HG Tyler Durden
There is a crisis in America. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home. Consequently, there is a “father factor” in nearly all of the societal ills facing America today. Research shows when a child is raised in a father-absent home, he or she is aected in the following ways…
TheNew York Times has published an anonymously sourced report titled “U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid” about the “placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before” which could potentially “plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military,” with one anonymous official reporting that “We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”
Obviously this is yet another serious escalation in the continually mounting series of steps that have been taken into a new cold war between the planet’s two nuclear superpowers. Had a report been leaked to Russian media from anonymous Kremlin officials that Moscow was escalating its cyber-aggressions against America’s energy grid, this would doubtless be labeled an act of war by the political/media class of the US and its allies with demands for immediate retaliation.
To put this in perspective, The New York Timesreported last year that the Pentagon was pushing for the US Nuclear Posture Review to include the strategy of retaliating against serious Russian cyberattacks on American power grids with nuclear weapons.
So that’s scary enough. What’s even scarier is the information that the Timesburied way down in the 21st to 23rd paragraphs of its report:
“Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place ‘implants’ — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.
“Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.
“Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.”
“New laws, enacted by Congress last year, allow such ‘clandestine military activity’ in cyberspace to go ahead without the president’s approval. So, in this case, those new laws are protecting American interests… by keeping the sitting president out of the loop. What a (scary) time to be alive.”
So Trump is in a bit of a bind now. The escalation has already been put in place, which will likely see an equal response from Moscow if it isn’t scaled back. But scaling it back would mean a whole new wave of shrieking alarmism from the political/media class about the conspiracy theory that just won’t die no matter how much evidence is mounted against it: that Trump is a controlled puppet of the Kremlin. All as he’s working to build the case for re-election in 2020.
Stephen F Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University and one of America’s leading experts on US-Russia relations, has been warning for years that exactly this would happen. In an April 2017 interview on Democracy Now, Cohen warned that placing political pressure on a US president to never step back from escalations during a showdown between nuclear superpowers could have potentially world-ending consequences should mounting tensions see a situation similar to the Cuban missile crisis again.
“I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said. “And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we — and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these — and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the worst imaginable — it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason.”
“Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said.
“Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war.”
People rarely take time to deeply reflect on the uniquely important fact that our species came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis. We learned long after it was all over that the only reason a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine didn’t discharge its payload on the US Navy and set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR was because one of the three men in the sub needed to authorize the weapon’s use stood against the other two and refused. That man’s name was Vasili Arkhipov, and he’s responsible for the fact that you and everyone you love exists today. There’s a good PBS documentary about the event on YouTube if you’re curious.
President Kennedy was constantly going back and forth in communication with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis, and any number of things could have gone cataclysmically wrong during that exchange had Kennedy not made certain concessions at certain times and known when to hold back instead of pressing forward. He made a series of diplomatic moves that would not be possible in this current paranoid, leak-prone climate, including secretly recalling the USA’s Jupiter missiles from their position in Turkey at Khrushchev’s request.
For all the outrage that liberals display whenever a high-profile Republican utters the phrase “deep state”, it sure is interesting that the Commander-in-Chief has found himself in a situation where he is at the whim of a collective of warmongers who are advancing pre-existing agendas against a nation they perceive as a geostrategic threat to US hegemony. It begs the question, who is really in charge?
The US war machine is the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, and the alliance of nations that it upholds is functionally the most powerful empire that the world has ever seen. Because so much power depends on the behavior of this gargantuan war engine, it is seen by those with real power as too important to be left to the will of the electorate, and too important to be left to the will of the elected Commander-in-Chief. This is why Americans are the most propagandized people in the world, this is why Russia hysteria has been blasted into their psyches for three years, and this is why we are all at an ever-increasing risk of dying in a nuclear holocaust.
UPDATE: Trump now seems like he might be denying that what The New York Times’ sources said is happening is happening. It’s unlikely that the Timeswould fabricate a story whole cloth, so if Trump is in fact denying the story then either the sources are lying about what they’re doing in their own purported jobs, or Trump is still being kept in the dark, or Trump is just lying.
“Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia,” Trump tweeted.
“This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country. ALSO, NOT TRUE! Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
Curiouser and curiouser.
* * *
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First in Poland it was the proposed “Fort Trump,” but now in Israel it is “Trump Heights”. In a breaking story that had us doing a double take just to assure it is indeed real, a new Israeli settlement in the occupied Golan Heights has been named ‘Trump Heights’ in honor Trump’s deeply controversial decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the territory.
Image source: AFP
None other than Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu presided over the opening ceremony, which featured the unveiling of a large sign bearing Trump’s name and US-Israeli criss-crossing flags.
The United Nations and other countries have not given international backing to the US recognition, which further last month involved the State Department officially changing world maps to reflect the new status. The settlement is yet to be established though the sign is in place, in what is sure to unleash a new wave of controversy and protests in Syria and the Palestinian territories.
Israel’s premier pledged in April to name a new settlement after Mr Trump, soon after the president overturned decades of US policy by recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan.
The region is located about 60km (40 miles) south-west of the Syrian capital, Damascus, and covers about 1,000 sq km (400 sq miles).
The new settlement is expected to be built near Kela in the northern Golan Heights. —BBC
Israel fully annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 after capturing it from Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967. The United Nations has never recognized Israeli annexation and settlement there, but has repeatedly condemned it — all of which has resulted in a Syria-Israel state of war ever since.
Later in the day Sunday President Trump retweeted a congratulations and photos highlighting the event – which had been sent from the US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who was on hand representing the United States during the ceremony.
Friedman noted it was the “first time Israel has dedicated a village in honor of a sitting president since Harry Truman (1949)” and further wished the president a happy birthday weekend (June 14).
Apparently, Israel’s Golan Regional Council has already received hundreds of requests from Jewish applicants abroad, especially in the US and Canada, who wish to move into the settlement.
According to local Israeli media, the Golan authority offices “have been ‘flooded’ with requests for information about new Golan community.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Zur0eg Tyler Durden
It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the President who did most of his campaigning traveling in his own private branded commercial airliner has plans to revamp Air Force One. And that’s exactly what President Donald Trump is doing, according to Bloomberg. Trump unveiled a new paint job for Air Force One on ABC late last week – one that looks similar to the “TRUMP” branded jets he flew around commercially while campaigning.
He told ABC: “There’s your new Air Force One, and I’m doing this for other presidents, not for me.”
He also claimed he got $1.6 billion in savings off the price of the project, while the Air Force said that Trump negotiations with Boeing yielded $1.4 billion in savings. The Air Force is responsible for managing the $5.3 billion program for Boeing to build two new presidential plans.
But Trump’s plan is being held up in congress – an amendment to the annual defense policy bill approved by the House Armed Services Committee (H.R. 2500) would bar changes to plans for the planes.
Air Force One’s paint job isn’t the first time that Trump has intervened in defense department projects. He personally pushed for cost cuts for Air Force One and the F-35 fighter and has demanded that “the Navy use old-fashioned steam-based catapults on its new aircraft carriers instead of a more advanced but occasionally unreliable electromagnetic system.”
A final decision on the paint job will come in 2021, so the plans could be abandoned if Trump loses his re-election bid next year. Estimates put the actual production of the plane – should Trump win – at September 2024, meaning he may never even get to fly on the plane, once completed.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MNEAb0 Tyler Durden
To anyone expecting a major breakthrough at the June 28-29 Osaka G-20 meeting, Wilbur Ross has a simple message: “Don’t.”
Speaking to the WSJ, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sharply played down prospects of a “major” trade deal if President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping meet at the Group of 20 summit in Japan later this month (which they very well may not as Xi has yet to commit to a meeting which would show him at a power disadvantage to Trump), but nonetheless he said he believes the two sides will ultimately get back to negotiations.
“I think the most that will come out of the G-20 might be an agreement to actively resume talks,” Ross said in a phone interview Sunday. “At the presidential level they’re not going to talk about the details of how do you enforce a trade agreement.”
So what is the best case scenario? Well: a return to square one, such diplomatic relations are now well in negative territory: “The most that might come is new ground rules for discussion and some sort of schedule for when detailed technical talks might resume,” said Mr. Ross.
Ross called in from the Paris Air Show, where the US aerospace industry is grappling with the fallout of the four-month grounding of the Boeing 737 Max airliner, not to mention global trade tensions that have darkened the outlook for many businesses. The aerospace execs present are also closely watching developments in the U.S.-China trade talks, which U.S. officials said were nearing a deal before the talks reached an impasse last month.
Ross’ attempt to sooth over the situation, left much to be desiredL “Even real shooting wars end with negotiation, and this will ultimately end in negotiations,” Mr. Ross said. “Whether that will be in 10 minutes, 10 weeks, 10 months or longer, it’s not possible to judge.” Hopefully it won’t be 10 years.
Meanwhile, D-Day draws near: seven days of hearings begin Monday in Washington during which businesses and other stakeholders will weigh in on the newest proposed tariffs, and businesses will then have an additional week—until July 2—to provide comment. After that, the U.S. can consider the feedback and act.
But before tariffs take effect, Trump and Xi may meet at the annual G-20 summit of the world’s leading economies, which will be held June 28-29 in Osaka, Japan. The problem is that the meeting between the two presidents hasn’t been formally arranged yet, but the U.S. has indicated it wants to hold the meeting and is likely to take further action if China does not agree to the meeting. Of course, Trump put Xi in another position of weakness saying that if the Chinese president does not show up, then the tariffs go up automatically. As such, compliance with Trump’s demand will be seen as weakness by the most powerful Chinese president in decades, and virtually assures that no such meeting will take place, and instead tit-for-tat escalation will be the norm.
As for the US? Well, they are blaming China of course: Ross said Washington would continue to push for trade terms more favorable to the U.S. and urged Beijing to return to the negotiating table.
“The Chinese are the ones who precipitated the crisis, they’re the ones that will have to end it by letting us know we’ll go back to where we were.”
In short: no deal.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WLnzD6 Tyler Durden
A horrifying practice is happening in China: dissidents in prison are being killed for their organs. That’s according to Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, who writes about the practice in an article published the New York Post.
The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. “Cut the veins and arteries,” he told his shocked intern.
George did as he was told. Blood spurted everywhere.
The kidneys were placed in an organ-transplant container.
Then the doctor ordered George to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and George froze.
“I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.
“Chinese dissidents are being executed for their organs, former hospital worker says” byStephen W. Mosher for The New York Post
According to Mosher, Zheng says he quit his job almost immediately, horrified by what was asked to do and what he saw. Zheng is also quoted as saying he fled China, fearful of the possibility that he could one day end up like the prisoners he’d seen.
Human rights observers say specific groups that go against China’s policies are targeted, such as Falun Gong – a Buddhist sect that was deemed harmful by the Chinese government in 1999. Many members were arrested, imprisoned and never seen again.
Mosher says Muslim minorities could be next, with millions of Uighur and Kazakh men being sent to Chinese concentration camps.
China, the rising power of the world, has seen one of its most popular drone companies step into the education market with a new robot that teaches children robotics, coding, and warfare.
DJI, the world’s largest drone maker, has branched out from its traditional Phantom and Mavic drones to an entirely new land-based robot called RoboMaster S1 will allow children to discover new technologies at an early age.
On June 11, the company unveiled the S1 in China. The new robot features 31 sensors, a stabilized camera, and a laser/pellet gun. Children, mostly Chinese at the moment, have had an early lead on getting their hands on these new, high-tech robots. When the S1s battle, there are hit-detecting sensors on each side of the vehicle that will allow the winner of each fight to immobilize their opponent(s).
However, there is a significant problem: The S1s are shipped as a kit (costing around $500), which means the youngsters who are assembling the drone must learn about robotics software for assembly.
“By doing the assembly process, you get to understand what each part is used for and what the principles are behind it,” says Shuo Yang, one of the lead engineers.
“We want it to look like an interesting toy that then teaches basic programming and mechanical knowledge.” Once built, the RoboMaster S1 can be used to blast away at other S1s during some good, old-fashioned at-home family combat.
Once the robot is assembled, it has extraordinary abilities. It can follow orders, recognize 44 different visual symbols, identify and track humans, and respond to gestures from humans, as well as recognizing other S1 robots and react accordingly during battle.
Children will learn some form of robotics through DJI’s series called “Road to Mastery” – will allow children at an early age to learn robotic warfare.
Children can use Python or Scratch to code new robot maneuvers so that they can one-up their opponent(s) during a fierce fight.
Frank Wang, DJI’s founder and chief executive officer, started DJI in 2006 and has since acquired at least 70% of the global civilian drone market, according to analysts and drone registrations.
Despite DJI’s global success, DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has repeatedly warned American companies and even civilians using Chinese-built drones “as they may contain components that can compromise your data and share your information on a server accessed beyond the company itself.”
Since DJI is labeled as a US national security concern, the proliferation of S1 robots in American households to teach children about robotics and coding seems limited. Meanwhile, China, the rising power of the world, will allow its youth (and anyone else who is friendly to Chinese technology) to become masters of robotics at an early age. In other words, China is advancing new technologies to its youth as it has ambitions of displacing the American empire by 2030. The best way to do that is through a highly educated civilization.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WJZRSz Tyler Durden
