I'm Gonna Huff, and I'm Gonna Puff ...

And he'll wind-up blowing North Korea too.

Donald Trump is reported by some media to have responded to the North Korean threat to' make the US pay' for its new sanctions program.  while everybody else on earth views the North Koreans as all talk and very little effective shelling, Trump had to respond in in kind - threatening an American response of "fire and fury",   this after US 'scientists' conceived that the North Koreans had advanced miniaturization processes in hand and had, in fact, produced an atomic warhead small enough to fit into the nose of the artillery rockets they have been firing into inner space of late.  Is it now also believed that those rockets, if fired on the same kind of trajectory as most other ICBMs,  could travel as far as Chicago.

Other US agencies were announcing a willingness to talk to North Korea if they promised to stop launching missiles.  And yet others were taking some delight in the prospect of costing  North Korea  a billion dollars a year in truncated exports - essentially we are told the USA was shutting down the North Korean sea food industry - as well of course as enduring they will be blackballed by anybody peddling weapons or electronic technology. So I guess when the gargantuan TV on Kim il Sung square goes on the blink, they'll be scrambling for some circuit boards and switches. That  should serve them right!

When the Norks actually did stop launching more missiles (at least the ones they said they were planning to shoot towards Wake)  the CinC congratulated them on being "wise" (good cop) , the Sec State (bad cop) said he'd be willing to talk but that it would take "a little more" something from the Norks.  They gave three short-range rockets as a reply (but they all 'failed' (yay!))


One has to wonder what, in all this,  did the North Koreans do to 'break the agreement' they had made with Clinton's America?  That saw them go from "world threat" to "world charity case" in less than three years. It also saw them allow US technicians to  'assist' in dismantling their sole nuclear reactor and, as far as was evident by inspection, stop developing Uranium towards making a weapon.  George Bush moved into the White House and before the dust settled on the WT complex,  the Norks were again "pariahs" and "threats" and the US was reneging on whatever Clinton had  agreed to do.

A Nork Nuke funny

They started work again. rebuilding their reactor and,  by the time Obama took over the fear mongering,  they had detonated a real bomb. Since then, 'the threat' has only gotten worse, exacerbated perhaps by the thought that , if they kept it up,  they might be tempted to nuke America rather than Seoul,  or Tokyo.   To-day, according to Trumpco, they can. And the US military, we were told last week waits only for the go signal.

When you Google "North Korea Nuke" this is the first image that isn't a 'real' rocket photo or a cartoon.  Even this is a photo=montage creation - for,you see, there is precious little evidence of Pyong yang's Nukes, either.   Hopefully that's enough to stop a war , as well  as to start one?

The 'situation' for Long Dong Clinton

The question remains - how lucky do we feel?

Gone from America's media is Syria - a perfectly good peoples' rising against tyranny has gone 'poof'.  Oh sure there is still stuff happening over there. The USAF is custom-bombing Raqqa, the Marines are bringing in equipment 'for themselves' (and the Syrian Kurds). But things have gone to hell in a handcart down in the Jordanian border - where a little incident (two weeks ago) involving some 'retreating' freedom fighters being 'ambushed' trying to cross into Jordan,  parlayed itself into a fight between factions and, a few days ago,  a fairly significant desertion (with all their equipment) by one group of America's 'anti-Assad' heroes.

So far,  whatever agreement about Syria that Trump made with Putin seems to be holding. and while it does,  the Assad forces are making significant inroads in blocking future coalition moves to 'grab territory', while putting some significant dents in ISIS land.  It would appear that Assad is moving toward the relief of Deir ez Zor  and clearing the rest of the Iraq border.   But none of this matters to American news sources for the news isn't good. They need another good 'gassing' while somebody still remembers the hokum about the last one. (actually there was an attempt again to launch an 'Assad dunnit' news story.  This once complete with the standard gasping babies and water hose decontamination procedures - flopped.  It didn't make the front page anywhere, maybe even not onto the 'beautiful baby- cruise missile strike calculator'.

Meanwhile America has shifted focus to considering a bunch of 'initiatives': somebody's got the military option for Venezuela out for a 'boo'.  'Defensive' lethal weapons ( how are they different from offensive lethal weapons?)  are 'on the table' for EUkrainia.  And just to show how much we care , the NATO contingent ( un-armed eh?) marched in EUkraine's national independence day military parade. Hopefully the Ukrainian 'elite' units (they didn't seem to be lacking much lethal equipment)  were around for the post-parade party, before shipping-out for some 'blooding' in the 'ostfront'.   The message for Putin 'ist klaaar' - Barbarossa only sleeps.

Addendum:

One of the side stories coming out of the Nork's threat to whirled piece is the answer to the question "How'd they do that?'  The answer being,  they bought the rocket technology from somebody.

What somebody? Probably directed by Putin's goons,  the finger initially pointed at Ukraine - purveyor of rockets parts and engines to everybody engaged in space activity.  The Ukrainians naturally denied doing it and fingered the Russians who, it was claimed,  had three or four Ukrainian-made roman candles that they hadn't bothered to shoot upwards. The russkies must have sold them to the Norks.

To-day another double back-cover story floating out of EUkrainia with all the eyes dotted and fingers crossed:  the saga of how Ukraine duped the Norks into stealing phony rocket plans and got hem doing it on tape.

Ecce evidencia

From this Day Forward

Trump may be 'on the job', but it's going to take America 4 years to get used to him.

While Washington and its media bathe in concentrated applied stupidity, the rest of the world continues down the road to heck in a handcart.
To wit -

 A double reminder of the threat that is Iran and the good guys in EUkrainia guarding the parapets of probity and western civilization. Remember how the Ukes didn't sell Chinese-made AA missiles to ISIS?  Well they defintely weren't trying to sell anti-tank rocket parts to Iran.  That was the Russians. Thank goodness they couldn't ship the stuff direct.

Caught ya, vlad!

The Italians are dealing with a snow catastrophe  and  Charlie Hebdo is 'taking the mickey' out of them. Meanwhile somebody rescued adorable puppies from the destroyed hotel.  'Where there are puppies, there is 'opa.'

Awww! How cute is this? 


Charlie, is nothing sacred?

Meanwhile in the heart of all that's good and holy, some tempests in the pisspot: first somebody's lying about the Inauguration crowd.  But who really cares, besides  some female stars of superhero movies, Madge the Vadge.and more than 4 million women world-wide?   Oh and the Trump White House and the liberal press - well - the Conservatives too.

Lying Liars who Lie

And Madge - the spokeswoman for all who Rock and Roll - is on the carpet for telling a million dames  she's often thought of blowing-up the White House. Sure she was "only fucking joking", but like, does she think America's as normal as she is?


The Pussy that Roared


Meanwhile Africa does 'Africa' as well as Africa often does. The quaint little western African enclave of  Gambia - which hasn't been on the front page since it was trans-shipping slaves, had an election recently. Apparently the Prime Minister, or President-for-life, was voted out of office.  Rather than appear at the inauguration of the new guy, like civilized folk,  he threatened to call out the army and defend himself.   The neighborhood was up in arms, literally, about that. the former colonial powers sent some gunboats and Marines to cruise off-shore. But the 'boss' (his Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Jammah) saw sense and jetted-off to refuge  neighboringEquatorial Guinea.

Not before taking a planeful of expensive automobiles, and household furnishings with him - or reputedly some $10 million in pocket cash.  He left enough 'belongings' behind to fill another three aircraft. It is questionable that these will be forwarded to him.


How much can you swipe, swiper?
 

And last but not least to-day and interesting but somewhat sad bit from Ireland.

Faith an begorrah. May she rest in peace.

El Commandante es Muerto

Fidel Castro is dead. The maker of one of the few successful revolutions of this century has stepped into History. Whether he 'changed the world' is debatable, but the world certainly knew he was here.  He brought the 'Cold war' home and laid it at America's doorstep. By allowing the Russians to do in Cuba what the Americans had done in Turkey a couple of years before, brought the world to the brink of war.

The World knows who the leader of the modest island in the Caribbean was. He made a name for Cubans in a hundred or more places, from Miami to Luanda, from Bolivia to Grenada and he 'scared the shit out of America'.  Castro Cubans were the 'bogey men' of a number of Hollywood 'existential threat' pics.

And so these days the world reacts to his passing, as it has done to his presence.  There are the normal 'tributes' to the dead - laying out his achievements, balanced for press consumption, in some cases, by his obvious failures. In other accounts he remains the ogre, the tyrant,  the dictator some parts of the world held him up to be.  The Cubans of Cuba announced an 8-day period of mourning and reports had the city of Havana described as 'sombre'. 170 air miles away the air was somewhat different as the Miami Cubans pulled out the stops on a 'national fiesta' that, on a number of occasions before,  had gone off half-cocked.  This time it was real and the joyful faces - which very much reminded me of those in the old photos taken at a lynching - were not stifled, this time, by news that 'El Barbo' lived on.

But all we really know of Fidel Castro is public persona and the details of his 'injustice' offered by those who suffered it.

In public Castro was larger, and longer, than life.  If people, as we are told, were 'forced' to attend his frequent public orations, not being able to walk away must have been an ordeal. But I have never read any report of the 'leavings' of those 'massive' crowds turned-out to listen - water bottles discarded underwear, 'droppings' or 'floods' that surely would have eventuated after a four hour 'rock concert' anywhere else.  I recall reading of the aftermath of a Papal Mass in Toronto upsetting the sewage system for a number of days, and I've seen pictures of the debris field left by the faithful on that occasion that gives rise to a question about the 'gatherings' after miracle of the loaves and fishes. One would think that, with the frequency of Fidel's oratorical 'olympics' in his heyday, that his critics would have made much of the evidence of the harm he inflicted on his audience. They didn't.

He was a lawyer by training, but had that been his forte, he probably might have risen no higher than a local judge in Cuba. While he had some of the looks, and the lip, he didn't seem to have the smarts to win the big cases.  He was a 'Commandante' but aside from actually 'being there' he was smart enough to lave the actual fighting to those who were better at it. Even the Bay of Pigs - a victory ascribed to him - he left to the pros to execute.  He was reputed to have been vindictive and cruel.  While there is little evidence that he involved himself personally in revenge and retribution, his signal failure is in not curbing those who actually did that. The anti-Castro rebels who temporarily seized Trinidad on the south coast as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion, was punished harshly as it was an insurrection - including many 'old comrades' of the original revolution - rather than an invasion. The rebels who took to the hills  north of town were never permitted to walk out of them. Castro's forces hunted them down and killed them to a man.

He was certainly secretive and security-conscious in his personal life. He protected his privacy, moving, like so many other 'enemies of democracy', from place to place, unannounced. This probably prevented him from living in the style to which 'presidents-for-life' (and he in fact wasn't one of those, seeking regular re-election as he did) are accustomed. From what we know of it,  his personal life was unostentatious. He never did have a proper 'generalissimos' outfit, probably even for his funeral.

He is lauded for his achievements in regard to life in Cuba - the education and health systems being the major cases in point. But I would say that one of his own seminal changes was the rapprochement with the Catholic Church.  As a good communist ideologue, and as a Cuban revolutionary, he saw 'the Church', in Cuba, as a part of that old 'system' that held the people in thrall to a government partially through a thralldom to God.  Castro was educated in the best of that 'old system', by the Jesuits. When he was in  school the Jesuits were just beginning to think about that 'revolution' in the Church that would start a decade after the Cuban one.  But Castro, the revolutionary, saw something in common with the revolutionary ('anti-communist') Pope from Poland and Cuba  - forty years into its revolution -  cleared its 'Museos' and restored the properties of the Church. Popes (a couple of them) visited the island and the Catholic church in Cuba is having a renaissance.  Despite that, one of America's claims is that there needs be more freedom of religious expression - for a number of American 'religious visitors' - Jewish,  Baptist Evangelicals and Jehovah's Witnesses have been arrested for espionage activities.   We'll see if Fidel has a funeral Mass.

If there is anything surprising it is that considering the minor role he played on the World stage, he's getting a lot more media ink than many of the Great Ones.

MH 17

Last July the singular event of Ukraine's recent tribulation came to earth in the fields around the village of  Grabovo. After an investigation lasting a year, and more, the report of the commission looking into the cause of the tragedy is to be made public in October - this after a requested 'delay' of some four months.

In the meantime, members of the investigations panel have continued to blame Russian separatists and have, more recently, approached the UNSC to pass a a resolution setting-up a UN tribunal to adjudicate the matter. The Russians have called the move premature,  inferring it is a move to preempt publishing the investigation findings, as promised,  by opening a court process.  Each of the four participants in the investigation - Holland, Ukraine, Belgium and Australia  - have an individual veto on publication should any of them 'disagree' with the findings. The fifth member Malaya - doesn't. That Ukraine, (in the absence of tangible proof of its claims is starting to look like a major actor in the tragedy or even might bear an innocent responsibility for possibly diverting that plane into danger rather than away from it), has a veto on the report,  is an unprecedented turn of events.



Using the evidence that does exist - the wreckage of the aircraft - it seems to be increasingly evident that an air-to-air missile followed by cannon fire may have brought the aircraft to earth. If that is indeed the case, then the fault lies entirely at the feet of the Kyiv government and a year of  increased EU and US  'sanctions', designed to bring down the Russian economy,  are an unwarranted act of economic aggression.

The Australian government has been 'leading the verbal charge' in support of Ukraine, that Russia is to blame, that sanctions should be broadened, that the UN should take over. And yet the Australian media have been highly selective in revealing details of the incident at a variance with the 'conventional wisdom' on the topic.  Here is a piece written on this by an Australian lawyer.

http://journal-neo.org/2015/04/27/mh17-how-the-media-failed-the-victims-and-the-families/

A recent RT documentary on the topic explores the Malayan connection, interviewing the families of the aircrew and exploring the possibility that something may have been missed or covered-up in the deaths of the crew.  The Global Media report of this indicates that the pilot's seats were left at the crash site, even though the cockpit area was identified, by the panel, as the site of the greatest damage by whatever it was downed the aircraft. The seats, as well as the bodies, should have been a fount of evidence of what those 'high velocity' objects entering MH17 really were. Nothing has been reported about the autopsies. And those seats were 'news' to investigators.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-mh17-pilots-corpse-more-on-the-cover-up/5467351

One of the main proponents of Russian involvement is a British blogger who claims that  popular media postings can be used to back-up the Ukrainian claims that the rebels had a Russian Buk system in eastern Ukraine, used it on the airliner and then evacuated the unit back to Russia for  eradication. His investigations have also revealed a spurious 'evidence' auction  purportedly buying audio transmissions relating to the crash. One of these involved an American, supposedly working for the CIA who was near the crash site the day the airliner was downed.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/07/29/the-strange-story-of-the-ten-thousand-bitcoin-mh17-investigation/comment-page-2/#comment-25289

Then there is another tangential report of an Malayan airliner 'twin' belonging to a US company and stored at an Israeli airport. A number of possible uses for such a dummy aircraft are reported. Along with this one of the last photographs taken of MH17, at the boarding gate for its last flight, by an interested Israeli who was not a passenger.

http://www.bollyn.com/home#article_14814

And finally there's the Corbett report on the topic, dated August 2014, but containing some points, even at that early date that have yet to be explained.

https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-294-crashes-of-convenience-mh17/

Even nuttier: the separatists were searching for 'pilots' who had descended by parachute. 5 parachutes were reported to have existed the passenger plane, or it's vicinity.  No pilots from the UAF were reported captured, or killed, the day of the crash, or in succeeding days. It could be possible parachutists were 'rescued' and taken to safety - in Ukrainian territory. .

"Mossad did it!" : those cockamamie Russians

The very latest up to the minute, etc

"Possible" missile fragments may have been found in the wreckage.  Seems this old hat as somebody was turning-up Buk fragments last August. They didn't turn out to be much at all,  as it couldn't be proven they even came from the incident, or the area. But who knows - the 'possibility' lit-up the twitterverse like Holy Writ.

To-day the 'russians' are being mocked over a completely terrible 'phone interception' of calls between Boris Badinov and a CIA agent in Donbass discussing their mission 'to down a passenger jet' last July.  The story has been around for a while, but recently was resuscitated when translated and published in a German Blog. The 'russians' claim it was presented to them by the former, now relieved,  head of the Ukrainian security service - the same interceptors of rebel missile shooters. They need such 'presents' like they need a new Czar.

But the supposed CIA man is an American blogger who actually was in Ukraine. He writes for a number of US sources, so somebody should ask him where he was and what he was doing the day the Boeing was dropped. That seems like a no-brainer.